NBA: Damian Lillard needs reinforcements. Now.
Heading into their fourth matchup against the Clippers on Monday, the Blazers are 11-13 and searching for answers.
When Damian Lillard was selected with the 6th pick in the 2012 NBA Draft, the Portland Trail Blazers hadn’t won a playoff series since 2000. And that team had Scottie Pippen—Blazers fans had been waiting for a while.
Over the next 12 seasons, Portland lost six first round series with a combined 9-22 playoff record. The success they did have during the regular season was thanks to the crew of LaMarcus Aldridge, Nic Batum, Brandon Roy, some Wes Matthews, and a little bit of Patty Mills. But they never got to the second round.
As a result, Lillard wasn’t the only new addition before the ‘12-13 season. After a disappointing ‘11-12 campaign, Portland hit the reset button. The Blazers brought on Neil Olshey to run the front office, and he selected Lillard, Meyers Leonard, and Will Barton in his first draft. Then, they hired Mavs assistant coach Terry Stotts to take over the team.
Even though the Blazers finished 33-49 in the first Lillard season, Dame played in all 82 games and put up healthy numbers alongside the older Aldridge, Matthews, and Batum. In fact, his rookie campaign is the only season to date that Lillard hasn’t made it to the playoffs.
In the 2013 draft, Portland used their first round pick on Lehigh shooting guard CJ McCollum, cementing their backcourt of the future. While McCollum developed on the bench, the starting lineup of Lillard, Matthews, Batum, Aldridge, and Robin Lopez put together a 54-28 record in the second year under Stotts.
In the first round of the 2014 playoffs, the Blazers had a chance to win their first series since 2000 in front of their home crowd. They were up 3-2 against the Houston Rockets—who were led by James Harden and Dwight Howard—and it finally seemed like Portland’s playoff woes might come to an end. But all that seemed like a lost cause when Chandler Parsons tipped in the go-ahead basket to put the Rockets up 98-96 with just 0.9 seconds left on the clock.
Blazers fans also weren’t too happy about the play that preceded the Parsons tip-in, where Lillard grabbed a rebound but it was ruled that he hadn’t yet established himself in bounds, and the Rockets got the ball back for what the final full possession of the game. You could feel the energy change as thousands of Blazers fans held their hands to their heads in disbelief—Portland was going to have to play Game 7 in Houston for the chance to move on.
But what the fans at the newly minted Moda Center didn’t know was that this was Lillard’s time to shine—Dame Time.
With Batum inbounding the ball, Lillard came off of two screens on the far side of the court to take a deep three from the end of the “S” in the PLAYOFFS logo on the left wing with plenty of room between him and the lunging Parsons. It was Portland’s first and only three of the fourth quarter, and the building exploded. Even though the Blazers went on to lose to the eventual champion Spurs in the conference semifinals, it really felt like the franchise was turning a corner.
In the six seasons since then, the Blazers have made it to the playoffs every year—including appearances in the Western Conference Semifinals in 2016 and the Western Conference Finals in 2019. They also finished with the 3rd seed in the West in both the ‘17-18 and ‘18-19 campaigns, with a 102-62 combined record across the two seasons.
Lillard was a top-10 MVP candidate in five of those six seasons, and in the ‘19-20 season prior to the pandemic he averaged 30 points, 4.3 rebounds, 8 assists, and 1.1 steals on 40% shooting from deep and 52.4% inside the arc while leading the league in minutes per game. He’s also finished in the top-10 for made three-pointers every single year he’s been in the league and he is the Blazers franchise leader in threes, points per game, PER, offensive win shares, and offensive box plus/minus.
If we’re being fair to Portland, there have been some great highlights in those campaigns. Chief among those has to be Dame’s buzzer-beating three at home in the 2019 playoffs against Oklahoma City to send the Thunder home and take Portland to the conference semifinals to face the Nuggets.
But due to a consistently imperfect roster and the poor luck of competing in the same conference as the Warriors, the Blazers have never been able to make it over the hump.
As a result, Portland decided to fire Stotts and hire Chauncey Billups, who spent 17 years in the NBA and won the Finals MVP Award in 2004 when he took the Pistons to their first title since the Bad Boys won back-to-back championships in ‘89 and ‘90. Billups was a five time All-Star and a two time All-Defensive selection, and his experience with the more physical style of play was supposed to help guide the development of a real defensive identity for the Blazers.
But after finishing in the bottom five in defensive rating over the last two seasons, Portland has continued that trend this year. Actually, they’re worse.
Even though they score the fifth-most points per hundred possessions, Portland has a negative net rating thanks to their league-worst defense. The Blazers allow a horrendous 114.3 points per hundred possessions, and the 1.9 point gap between them and the 29th ranked Pelicans is almost as big as the gap between New Orleans and the 21st ranked Lakers.
That’s despite the new schemes that Billups has instituted and his efforts to hold his players accountable for their intensity on the defensive end. And while the addition of Larry Nance Jr. this offseason was definitely a step in the right direction in favor of defensive versatility, all the scheming in the world can’t fix a roster that just isn’t put together to provide the stopping power they need in order to compete against NBA talent.
As The Ringer’s Kevin O’Connor plainly stated a few days ago, Dame deserves better. McCollum and Lillard have been Portland’s primary shot creators for six full seasons now, and while the Blazers have made the conference semifinals (2016) and conference finals (2019) in that span, they’ve only finished in the top-10 for net rating twice.
That’s in part because while CJ has consistently been in the top 10% of all players in offensive +/-, his best defensive +/- as a full time starter was when he broke even in 2016. That’s not sustainable when Lillard is also a negative on defense—he'‘s only ever finished with a positive +/- on defense twice, in 2018 and 2019 when he hit +0.6 and +0.4, respectively. Dame has never finished outside of the top 4% in offensive +/-, so the clear need in the backcourt is someone who can compensate for his weaknesses, not replicate them.
What’s different about this season in Portland is that the addition of wing Norman Powell and the development of Anfernee Simons have made have made CJ much more tradable than he was in the past. Powell can play as a small forward or as a shooting guard, and even though he doesn’t have the same shot creation skills as McCollum he is a serious defensive upgrade and is far from being a minus on offense. If Portland can get a piece that really complements the roster like Ben Simmons, it would be well worth the cost of letting go of McCollum.
The comparison that KOC provides in his breakdown—between a Lillard-Simmons duo in Portland and the Steph-Draymond duo in Golden State—should give Blazers fans some hope for the future. But it requires accepting that the Dame and CJ era has run its course, and allowing ourselves to appreciate how much fun the two have been together while still looking towards the future.
If this is indeed going to be the end of this duo, we owe it to the them to remember this period in Blazers history as one of the most consistently successful, fun, and exciting times to be a Portland fan. Just because they never won a title together doesn’t mean that CJ won’t be a part of Blazers lore and culture for a long time, and I know that wherever he lands both the team and the fans will be lucky to have him.
The Blazers (11-13) host the Clippers (12-12) on Monday night at 7:00 p.m. PT.