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PORTLAND, Ore. — Trail Blazers head coach and former NBA Finals MVP Chauncey Billups believes Brooklyn Nets guard Kyrie Irving is “the most skilled player” to ever play the point guard position.

“Kyrie is just, he’s a wizard, man,” Billups said before Monday’s game against the Nets. “He’s must-see TV. I personally think, as somebody that played the position, I think Kyrie’s the most skilled player that’s ever played that position. Just straight skill. Nothing else. Just straight skill, I think he’s the best that I’ve ever seen at the position, skill-wise. So obviously he gives you a ton when he’s playing.”

Billups’ remarks came in response to a question about just how much different the Nets become when Irving is on the floor. Monday marks just the second game all season that Irving, who is not vaccinated against COVID-19, has played in.

Irving, 29, was not with the Nets to start the season because they decided against having a part-time player in the wake of New York City’s vaccination mandate. The organization reversed course last month after a COVID-19 outbreak made its way through the team. Irving returned last Wednesday in a win over the Indiana Pacers, showing flashes of being the dominant offensive he has always been.

“His shot-making is incredible,” Billups said. “He’s a better passer than people give him credit for. He’s obviously a willing teammate. He’s not just all about Kyrie. He passes the ball. He’s a champion. He brings championship pedigree to the table. I think he hit maybe the biggest shot that I ever seen in NBA Finals history, that I seen.

“So he brings all of those things to you and now without him, what a luxury, you still have two guys [in Kevin Durant and James Harden] that have been the MVP in this game and have carried teams a long, long way. So they do a really good job of playing well together, when they’re all three together, they know how to delegate their roles as good as anybody that I’ve seen. So it’s a very unique situation, obviously they’re figuring it out.”

Nets coach, and former two-time league MVP, Steve Nash agreed with Billups’ assessment about Irving.

“It’s hard to argue,” Nash said. “There’s others in the conversation, obviously. Steph [Curry] is incredibly skilled but just so deadly from long-range in a variety of ways. But just as far as the ball-handling, the movement, getting to his spots and shooting at all three levels, around the rim, he’s off the charts. Getting to the midrange he’s off the charts. He’s excellent from deep as well.”

As much as Billups respects Irving’s game, it’s notable that the longtime player, and now coach, believes that it will be difficult for the Nets to ultimately find their rhythm with Irving only able to play in most road games — for now.

“I just think it’s going to be tough,” Billups said. “Obviously when you got the two dudes that they have [in Durant and Harden] minus Kyrie, there’s a chance that it can work anyway … they’re doing a good job of just kind of understanding and knowing that they’re almost going to be like two different teams. When Ky is there, and when he’s not. And the good luxury that they have is that they can be a great team — both teams are great teams.”

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Before chairman George McCaskey said the words “Ryan Pace,” “Matt Nagy” or even “Bears” on Monday, he mentioned Ted Phillips. In fact, it was his first significant order of business, after a polite greeting and before launching into his prepared comments.

“Good afternoon, everyone,” he said. “Thank you for being on the call. I’m sorry that we can’t meet in person. Ted Phillips is also on the call …”

Close your eyes, and you imagine what it will sound like to be in a Zoom meeting for the Bears’ general manager opening. Phillips, the once-and-future president/CEO, was on the call – of course he was – even as McCaskey tried to sell a “modified organizational structure” as real change.

It’s not, of course. The Bears’ next general manager will report directly to McCaskey instead of to Phillips, who will be preoccupied with the team’s Arlington Heights stadium site.

The next seven days, though, will be no different than it was seven years ago: Phillips will take part in interviewing and helping McCaskey pick the next general manager. He’ll even negotiate the contract with him. And once that’s done, Phillips will still be McCaskey’s most trusted advisor, holding the same position he’s had since 1999. The Bears have won three playoff games — three! – during that time.

“I have great respect for his judgment, his analytical skills, his instincts when it comes to the people that we’re interviewing,” McCaskey said.

McCaskey said Phillips has done “an outstanding job as president and CEO.” Also, for good measure: “Our family has complete faith in him.”

Bears fans grimaced. Those that hoped for a dramatically different structure – the hiring of a president of football operations, who’d then pick the general manager – will have to keep waiting.

The Bears “did talk about what was the best path forward,” McCaskey conceded, but preferred to stick with the idea of the general manager being the highest-ranking “football guy” at Halas Hall.

“I don’t think there’s anything magical about a so-called football czar,” McCaskey said. “At some point, the football person, whether it’s the general manager or an executive vice president or a president of football operations, at some point that person has to report to ownership. We think with the modification that we’ve made, we’ve got the right structure for the Bears going forward.”

How exactly that plays out, McCaskey can’t say.

“I haven’t had a general manager report to me, so I’ve got a lot to learn in that regard,” he said. “And am counting on the new general manager to help me along in that process.”

Not exactly encouraging.

Phillips is a competent businessman, but his presence in end-of-season press conferences – as a surrogate McCaskey – have made him a symbol of stagnation to many Bears fans. It doesn’t help when he says things like he did last year.

“Have we gotten the quarterback situation completely right? No. Have we won enough games? No,” he said then. “Everything else is there.”

Is it still?

“Well clearly we weren’t happy with the results,” Phillips said Monday. “So, we need to get better. And I think as George pointed out, … the fact that the general manager is going to report to him, which is a big change.”

It’s not. Not in terms of hiring.

It’s no different than the end of the 2014 season when McCaskey, Phillips and 73-year-old advisor Ernie Accorsi interviewed head coaches and general managers before picking Pace to be the latter. This year, it will be McCaskey, Phillips, 79-year-old advisor Bill Polian, vice president of player engagement Soup Campbell and senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion Tanesha Wade doing the interviewing.

“The change in the interview room is that we’ve got three new people in the room,” McCaskey said. “so we’ve got the benefit of their perspective.”

There are two constants from the Bears’ last GM search. One is the team’s chairman, the grandson of its founder and the appointed leader of football’s first family.

The other is Phillips. Still.

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Bears chairman George McCaskey sat on a Zoom call a year ago and said everything would be fine.

Don’t worry, he assured, he saw the same problems everyone else did and was just as mad. But he insisted that general manager Ryan Pace and coach Matt Nagy could fix them. The collective culture of the Bears would get this right.

It still hasn’t. And any optimism that sprouted from the Bears resetting the organization Monday morning by firing Pace and Nagy wilted by the afternoon when McCaskey laid out plans to find their replacements. He will lead a hiring committee that includes president Ted Phillips and former executive Bill Polian.

In McCaskey’s decade running the organization, the Bears have hired Marc Trestman, John Fox and Nagy as coaches. The general managers have been Phil Emery and Pace. Not a winner in the bunch.

Phillips puts the party in search party. He’s done such a great job overseeing the general managers that McCaskey said the franchise’s biggest change going forward is that he won’t. The next general manager will report directly to McCaskey. So Phillips supposedly is removed from the chain of command, but will still be influential in the new hires.

And while Polian is a Hall of Famer who won Executive of the Year six times, he is 79 years old, hasn’t worked in an NFL front office since 2011 and infamously said eventual MVP quarterback Lamar Jackson should switch to wide receiver. He also has no personal stake in whether the upcoming moves work out.

Those three, vice president of player engagement Soup Campbell and senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion Tanesha Wade will be the five people in the room for interviews.

That process started rolling Monday when the Bears requested permission to speak to Bills defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier, ESPN reported. Frazier was a cornerback on the ’85 Bears, has 12 years experience as a coordinator and was Vikings head coach from 2011 through ’13.

The Bears also submitted a request to the Colts for director of college scouting Morocco Brown, NFL Network reported. Brown was in the Bears’ front office from 2001 through ’07.

Firing Pace and Nagy were the right decisions after a 6-11 season in which the offense made none of the progress McCaskey demanded in January, but they were a year late and exposed his lack of vision.

When pressed on whether the Bears would’ve been better off doing this at the end of the 2020 season, when they’d gone 8-8 for the second year in a row, McCaskey couldn’t justify it other than indicating he felt he owed it to Pace and Nagy.

“At the time we thought the continuity was the best route forward,” said McCaskey, who saddled them with the conflicting mandates of winning now but acting in the best interest of a future they knew they might not be part of.

Continuity is for good teams. The Patriots and Packers should prioritize continuity. But why would the Bears want more of the same from a general manager who made many costly personnel flubs and a coach who was always just another week away from his offense finally clicking?

Blowing up the roster and cleaning house at that point would’ve set the Bears up for a nightmare season with a mountain of losses in 2021. But they arrived at that outcome anyway — only without the central benefits of freeing up salary-cap space and accumulating a stockpile of draft picks that would’ve come with doing it on purpose.

The closest McCaskey came to an explanation was that Nagy had a winning record and the team had made the playoffs two out of three seasons — even when everyone involved said at the time the 2020 playoff berth was meaningless for an 8-8 team that lucked its way in and got blasted out of the first round.

Nagy left with a winning record — barely — at 34-31 in the regular season and 0-2 in the playoffs, but never delivered on the two projects the Bears hired him to tackle: He did not install a functional offense, nor did he develop a quarterback.

As he exits, the most generous view of his effect on prized rookie quarterback Justin Fields is that he did more good than harm. But there’s sure to be some unlearning under the new coach.

And Pace steered the Bears to a 48-65 record, tied for seventh-worst in the NFL over his tenure. Three-quarters of the league won a playoff game during that span, but not the Bears.

That bottom-lined his failed run as general manager, but the details are equally exasperating. Pace made likely the biggest draft mistake in franchise history by trading up to pick Mitch Trubisky No. 2 overall in 2017, when Patrick Mahomes went eight picks later. He also missed on first- or second-rounders Kevin White, Leonard Floyd, Adam Shaheen and Anthony Miller.

And Trubisky was far from his only mistake at quarterback. The subsequent trade and contract for Nick Foles and the convoluted mess caused by promising Andy Dalton the starting job when the Bears were recruiting him, then drafting Fields six weeks later.

“The hiring of Ryan Pace and Matt Nagy, I don’t regret that,” Phillips said. “They both brought a lot to the Bears. Ultimately, on the field the results weren’t [what] we wanted, but I think they checked a lot of the boxes.”

In this business, wins are far and away the biggest box to check.

It’s strange that the Bears keep failing to see that. They talk about culture, for example, but truly great cultures lead to substantive success. In the end, just like the pledge Monday to finally get this right, it’s just talk. And the Bears saw clearer than ever this season what that’s worth.

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It’s early in the process for the Chicago Bears but already they have two targets they want to interview for their head coach job. After reports surfaced on Monday that they put in a request to interview Leslie Frazier, the team is now likely to interview Doug Pederson per a report.

The NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero is reporting that the Bears are planning on interviewing the former Philadelphia Eagles head coach who is also drawing interest from Jacksonville as well:

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The Bears tried to describe their $197.2 million pending purchase of stadium land in Arlington Heights as some sort of happy accident. Both chairman George McCaskey and president/CEO Ted Phillips went out of their way Monday to say that they didn’t set out to pursue the 326-acre former racetrack site until they were contacted by a selling agent.

But make no mistake: the team has grand plans for the site, if and when the sale goes through. Both McCaskey and Phillips made that clear in their first public comments about the property since they agreed to buy it in September – or since they announced they intended to bid on it in June. In fact, neither McCaskey nor Phillips had spoken to reporters in almost a year.

“There’s nothing else like it in Chicagoland,” said Phillips, who is in charge of the project. “So, the opportunities? you know, we haven’t even begun to envision what it could be. But we’re hopeful that if we close, that we’ll be moving forward with turning it into a wonderful destination site. Again, the timing of it we don’t know, because we haven’t even closed on the land. We don’t close on the land, then all that vision won’t come to fruition.

“But we’re excited it could be an entertainment destination with multiple facets to it that I think could really help put Arlington Heights on the map as a destination spot.”

That likely includes more than a stadium – an entertainment district with restaurants, bars and a hotel property.

Escrow on the purchase the Bears made from Churchill Downs won’t close until the end of this year – or even the first quarter of 2023. Citing that timeline, McCaskey was more reserved than Phillips when asked about what could be a franchise-altering decision: leaving Soldier Field, the Bears’ home since 1971, to build a stadium in the northwest suburbs.

“On a property of this size, that time between under contract and closing is vastly expanded,” McCaskey said. “So there’s a lot of due diligence that needs to be performed before we can close.”

Even as the Bears hire staffers and vendors to help them study the Arlington Heights site, McCaskey said Monday the team was “happy to engage” with both the city and the Chicago Park District “about present operations at Soldier Field.” The stadium was remodeled in 2002 for $587 million but lacks a large capacity and luxury amenities of the league’s newer stadiums. Because the Bears don’t own the stadium — the Chicago Park District does — they’re limited in what they can do, and how much money they can make, on the lakefront.

Asked the last time the Bears spoke with city officials, McCaskey said it was “a few weeks ago.”

The Bears have a lease at Soldier Field through 2033, though they could pay to leave sooner. Staying on the lakefront seems unlikely — Phillips said that the Bears’ “focus for long-term development is exclusively on that property at Arlington Heights.”

In one breath, McCaskey called the property 6 miles north of the Northwest Tollway “an outstanding, long-term proposition with high potential for the Bears.” in another, he stressed that any talk about building a stadium there would have to wait.

“All we’re doing is exploring the property’s potential,” he said. “We don’t even own the property yet. And any questions beyond that would be premature at this point.”

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COLUMBUS, Ohio — When the Blackhawks’ Seth Jones and Blue Jackets’ Adam Boqvist face their respective former teams for the first time Tuesday, the blockbuster trade they headlined last summer will reenter the spotlight.

But the narrative will remain the same. No matter how well Jones plays for the Hawks — and he has played very well so far — he’ll never be able to equal the value of the assets ex-Hawks general manager Stan Bowman gave up to acquire him. That’s not his fault, but it’s true.

Boqvist is one thing. Cole Sillinger, the dynamic forward who already looks like a steal at 12th overall, is another. And the Hawks’ 2022 first-round pick — which would be sixth overall if the season ended today — irreversibly tips the scales in the Jackets’ favor.

The question now is how heavily tipped the scale will appear in retrospect. As new Jackets coach Brad Larsen said Monday, the exact impact of the trade won’t be known until “two, three, four years down the road.”

There are still many unknowns. Jones could conceivably justify his eight-year extension if he keeps playing like this for a decade, or could turn into a Brent Seabrook-like cap liability in his 30s. Boqvist, meanwhile, might develop into a Jones-like elite offensive defenseman or might never take that big, final step.

The same goes for Sillinger, whose range of outcomes is as wide as a just-formed hurricane despite his lofty pedigree — it’s difficult to extrapolate too much from his 12 points in 33 games to date. And the likely-top-10 pick the Jackets will receive, barring a miraculous lottery win that would allow the Hawks to keep it, could turn into anyone.

Tuesday’s matchup — and Jones, Boqvist and Sillinger’s performances in it — won’t realistically clear up any of that. But it will be meaningful and somewhat emotional for at least the two defensemen.

“My mindset is going to be like every other game: just go out there and play at my best and be smart, be strong,” Boqvist said Monday, his signature goofy grin looking out of place in a dark-blue hoodie. “But it’s going to be a little different with Chicago on the other side.”

The 21-year-old Swede remains close with a number of Hawks; he spent Christmas with Alex DeBrincat, for example. In Sweden last July, though, he was blindsided by the trade, first finding about it on Instagram.

“It was a little bit surprising,” he said. “We didn’t know anything, actually. My agent talked to [Bowman] right after the season or so, because there were some rumors around, and he said, ‘We won’t trade Adam.’ But it’s a business and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m happy in Columbus.”

He has averaged 16:41 of ice time through his first 23 games for the Jackets, slightly down from his 16:59 average with the Hawks last season. Tuesday will coincidentally mark his 100th career game.

Although his stats this season do look impressive — he leads all Jackets regulars with a 52.0% even-strength scoring-chance ratio, and he’s tied for sixth among all NHL defensemen with seven goals — Larsen’s evaluation of him Monday sounded remarkably similar to many old Jeremy Colliton quotes.

“As an undersized guy, we know he’s going to have to defend, and if you want a top-four role, you’ve got to make sure that part of your game is tight,” Larsen said. “There’s a lot of room for growth there. It’s not a knock on him; it’s just he’s still a young man.”

Boqvist seemed more encouraged personally about his progression, saying his “overall game has been better” and his “strength is better, as well.”

The Hawks will get to evaluate that firsthand Tuesday. But even if they like what they see, they won’t be able to ask for him back.

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Please send scores and corrections to [email protected]

Monday, January 10, 2022

RED NORTH-WEST

Young at Lincoln Park, 6:30

WHITE WEST

Austin at Perspectives-MSA, 5:00

BLUE SOUTH

Hirsch at EPIC, 5:00

INTERSTATE EIGHT

Sandwich at Plano, 7:00

LITTLE TEN

Somonauk at Leland, 7:00

METRO PREP

Islamic Foundation at Chesterton, 6:30

Universal at CPSA, 5:30

NOBLE BLUE

Baker at Golder, 7:00

Mansueto at Rauner, 5:30

Muchin at Pritzker, 7:00

NORTHERN LAKE COUNTY

Round Lake at North Chicago, 7:00

RIVER VALLEY

Grace Christian at Gardner-South Wilmington, 7:00

SOUTHWEST SUBURBAN RED

Bradley-Bourbonnais at Lincoln-Way Central, 6:15

NONCONFERENCE

Wells 54, Intrinsic 34

Aurora Christian at Mooseheart, 7:00

Beacon at Intrinsic-Downtown, 6:30

Chicago Academy at Ogden, 5:00

Cristo Rey at Juarez, 5:00

DuSable at Raby, 5:00

Hoffman Estates at Maine East, 7:30

Hope Academy at Jones, 6:30

Momence at Reed-Custer, 6:45

Northtown at Steinmetz, 4:45

Shepard at Stagg, 6:00

Vernon Hills at Buffalo Grove, 7:30

Westminster Christian at Westlake Christian, 7:00

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