30 NBA Players in 30 Days: Damian Lillard
Day 6 of our countdown to the 2022–2023 NBA season brings us to Portland and a familiar face, Damian Lillard. One of the newest members of the NBA’s Top 75 list, and one of Oakland’s most beloved hometown heroes is entering his 11th season at 32 years old. Fun fact, I attended a distant cousin’s wedding in the summer of 2012 and the venue it was held at was two stories, so there was room for two events to go on at the same time. The top floor was the wedding reception, and the bottom floor was actually Lillard’s draft party with his family and friends. I did not get to see the rookie point guard at the time, but word from the employees at the venue quickly spread, and you could actually hear speeches and toasts from his family members if you hung out by the stairs.
Aside from that random story, Lillard has a huge season coming up. After only playing only 29 games last season because of an abdomen injury and surgery, the veteran star is faced once again with a mountain to climb back up in the Western Conference. The NBA is somewhat weird in that time can feel like it passes way faster than it actually does. It feels like an eternity since Lillard was still talked about as being a top 10 player in this league and almost single-handedly winning playoff games with outrageous scoring games. My biggest question and why I chose Lillard for the Blazers instead of any of the new additions to the team, is how much does he have left in the tank? We asked ourselves that about Steph Curry this season, and he ended up winning a championship. Not to say that their situations and supporting casts are the same, but after a strange abdominal injury for a smaller guard who has the weight of his team every night, it’s fair to start that discussion. Do I actually believe the decline starts now? Not exactly. NBA athletes today have such a wide range of treatment options, personal chefs, and trainers that basically increases the lifespan of their careers. For the Blazers to be in the mix of the playoff teams, Lillard has to be amazing. He might actually have to be a little bit better on offense, especially with CJ McCollum playing in New Orleans.
In the 29 games Lillard played last year, he put up 24.0 PPG, 4.1 RPG, 7.3 APG, 40 FG%, 32.4 FG3%, on 18.3 PER, the lowest since his rookie year. I’m not ready to say that the supernova version of Lillard is dying, but if there are more signs of him slowing down, the Blazers have no chance of maybe even getting out of the Play-In Tournament, let alone the 1st or 2nd round of the playoffs. He has a lot more help in terms of defense on the roster now, compared to the usual turnstyles that the Blazers would sign in years past. Guys like Anfernee Simons and Gary Payton II burst onto the scene last year, with Simons being an explosive young scorer and Payton fighting for the title of best perimeter defender in the league. Hopefully his pick and roll partner, Jusuf Nurkić, has a fully healthy season, but it all falls on Lillard’s shoulder. The Blazers will go as far as he takes them.
Is it ever too late for a superstar to change his game? If it is for the betterment of the team, I don’t think so. If he has not figured it out already, Lillard will soon find out that he can’t do it by himself, and is going to have to rely a lot on his teammates throughout the season for them to have any sort of success. In 2019, he and the Blazers had a short whiff of what it’s like to be one round away from reaching the NBA Finals. Was Lillard prepping to order a meal, or was the small cup of coffee all he could have? Only he can definitively answer that question.
