Portland Trail Blazers: Is Damian Lillard Having the Best Rookie Season in Franchise History?

Damian Lillard is a near lock for NBA Rookie of the Year. How does he compare to other former Trail Blazers that have won that same award? Photo Credit: Chrishmt0424 (Flickr.com)

The Portland Trail Blazers have the distinction of boasting the NBA’s Rookie of the Year in each of the first two seasons of the franchise’s existence – both the 1970-71 (Geoff Petrie) and 1971-72 (Sidney Wicks) campaigns. In addition, Brandon Roy claimed the award in 2006-07 even though he missed 25 games due to injury. This is all notable for the fact that the team is virtually assured of enjoying its fourth such award at the end of this season, what with Damian Lillard’s tearing up the league month after month.

The natural question, then, is this: Is Lillard the best of this group of elite athletes? And if you say “yes,” how do you best justify this answer?

Petrie, a 6’ 4” guard who played college ball at Princeton, actually split the Rookie of the Year award with Boston’s Dave Cowens in 1971, the Blazers’ first year in the NBA. This was despite Petrie statistically outpacing Cowens, a center, in most respects, as he averaged 24.8 points per game to Cowens’ 17.0 for the Celtics. (Cowens did snag 15.0 rebounds a game.) Interestingly, Petrie’s 2,031 points that season would prove to be a career high; after Petrie was traded to the Hawks after six seasons with the Blazers, his career ended abruptly thanks to a knee injury that kept him from ever suiting up in an Atlanta uniform . In addition, Petrie shot .443 from the field as a rookie and managed to grab 3.4 rebounds per game as well as dish out 4.8 assists per contest. One can’t help but wonder how much more prolific the outside-shot specialist might have been with the benefit of the then-nonexistent 3-point field goal.

Sidney Wicks was one of the lone bright spots for the Trail Blazers in their early years after an amazing collegiate career with the UCLA dynasty. (Photo: commons.wikimedia.org)

Wicks joined the Blazers after a stellar career at UCLA, where he helped propel the Bruins to three straight NCAA titles. Paired with Petrie in Portland, Wicks began his pro career in a fashion eerily similar to his slightly senior teammate, knocking out 24.5 points per game and, like Petrie before him, appearing in all 82 contests in his maiden tour of the league. Wicks, a 6’ 8” power forward, also grabbed 11.5 rebounds per game and even dealt out 4.3 assists per contest, a fine total for a frontcourt man. Wicks would go on to play five seasons in Portland, departing for the Celtics at the same time Petrie concluded his days in the Pacific Northwest. Wicks’ 22.3 points a game as a Blazer was at the time the best mark in team history, but has since been surpassed by Kiki Vandeweghe (23.5).

Fast-forward more than a quarter of a century to Roy, a 6’ 6” scoring machine who played college hoops for the University of Washington. Roy didn’t have the statistical shazam of either Petrie or Wicks as a rookie, but by the time he entered the scene the NBA had evolved considerably, and 20-points-a-game scoring had been largely relegated to the dustbin of history. Roy managed a solid 16.8 points a game as a rookie, shot an excellent .838 from the free-throw line and a decent .377 from 3-point land and also doled out 4.0 assists per evening—all of this even though a left heel problem limited his action to 57 games. Roy actually retired from basketball in 2011, citing the fact that his knees had deteriorated to the point at which he could no longer function at the level to which he was accustomed, but later made a comeback with the Minnesota Timberwolves.

Which leaves us with the flavor of the present, Lillard. Chosen sixth in the 2012 draft out of Weber State University in Utah, Lillard wasted no time making an impact, cranking out his 23-point, 11-rebound performance in his pro debut against the Los Angeles Lakers. In a January game against Golden State, Lillard notched 37 points and seven 3-pointers. As of this writing, with the NBA regular season all but in the books, Lillard, all 6’ 3” of him, has averaged 19.0 points a game to go with 6.5 assists and 3.2 rebounds. He’s been named Western Conference Rookie of the Month five straight times in the 2012-13 season and there is no conceivable way he won’t also win the award for the whole shebang.

So who had the best rookie season of them all? It’s a difficult call, and not simply for the fact that it’s hard to compare a point guard to a power forward to a shooting guard even when they’re contemporaries, much less when their careers are spread across four decades. It’s tempting to highlight Wicks’ exceeding both 20 points and 10 rebounds a game, but the fact remains that the league that Lillard is currently busting open is a much tougher league than the one the others faced. The extent to which this is true can be nothing but a judgment call, but the right call is nevertheless to argue that Lillard is at least the equal of his hallowed predecessors in Oregon if not their better. More to the point, fans at the Rose Garden can rightfully expect to enjoy a lot more of Lillard in the years to come.