It's Dame Time Again
Portland's superstar is back in form to start the year, and the Blazers are reaping the benefits.
Damian Lillard didn’t look great in the preseason. His 15.0 points per game led the Portland Trail Blazers in scoring, but his 39.4 percent field goal percentage and 33.3 rate from beyond the arc fell woefully short of expectations. The Blazers’ superstar guard simply wasn’t himself.
The story that seemed to be unfolding at the end of Portland’s preseason slate wasn’t a new one.
Lillard got off to a slow start last year, struggling to find his shot while dealing with a lingering abdominal injury. He opted for surgery after 29 games of uninspiring play, managing shooting splits that were eerily similar to those he posted throughout the Blazer’s most recent preseason (40.2 percent from the field and 32.4% from deep).
The injury was a straightforward enough causal link to his wayward shooting, but Lillard’s age - 31 at the time of surgery and 32 in the current season - added a wrinkle of complexity.
Was it possible that he was just slowing down?
Lillard subsists on a diet of incredibly difficult shots, the most impressive of which come from distance. Every variety of off-the-dribble three is in his arsenal. Thirty-foot bombs are not uncommon. When opponents sell out to take away the triple, Lillard has the burst, strength, and touch to get to and finish by the basket.
None of what he does is easy, but that’s part of what makes Lillard so special. He lives on a knife’s edge. Lose just a little bit of balance, strength, or quickness and what was once a game built on incredibly impressive shotmaking just becomes a bunch of inefficient clankers.
It turns out having a hole in your abdomen is once such instance that sufficiently drained the athleticism that Lillard’s approach requires. Plenty of onlookers wondered outloud if he might not ever get back to what he once was after his injury. Lillard’s preseason performance only increased doubts about his potential return to form.
Those doubts have been silenced.
Lillard has had an absolutely torrid start to the 2022-23 season, leading Portland to a 4-0 record while averaging 33.3 points per game on .500/.400/.917 shooting splits. The Blazers have outscored opponents by a full seven points per 100 non-garbage-time posessions in Lillard’s minutes thus far, per Cleaning the Glass.
Portland supplemented the talent surrounding Lillard this offseason by signing Josh Hart and trading for Jerami Grant, finally adding the kind of two-way competence on the wing that the Blazer’s roster has been crying out for during the majority of Lillard’s career.
Whether or not Heart and Grant can do enough to ensure that Portland holds up defensively is an open question. Lillard and fellow backcourt mate Anfernee Simons are both quite bad on that end of the court, and center Jusuf Nurkic doesn’t provide a ton of value beyond being enormous by the basket (an admittedly non-trivial contribution).
If Lillard is the player we’ve come to know and love - the one who rains down threes on opponents with reckless abandon and warps defenses as soon as he steps across halfcourt - then the Blazers will only have to be about league average defensively to be a really good team.
Maybe it’s too small of a sample to fully declare Lillard back, but you can doubt him at your own peril. It’s Dame Time again, and as long as that’s the case, Portland is a threat.