Portland Trail Blazers: Damian Lillard Is The NBA’s Hottest Player
By Duncan Smith
The Portland Trail Blazers have been tearing through the opposition for six weeks now, and the biggest reason is the transcendent play of Damian Lillard.
The Portland Trail Blazers were left for dead by virtually everybody in the basketball world after losing the majority of their starting lineup this past offseason, and in spite of a fast start in November, it looked like they had conceded their fate as Western Conference cannon fodder as recently as the first week of January.
As it turns out, it looks like the Blazers fooled almost everybody.
The Blazers had a record of 15-24 on Jan. 8, were coming off a three-game losing streak and were losers of four out of five games. None of those losses was closer than an 11-point home loss to the Memphis Grizzlies, and the lone win was a tight 112-106 win over the Denver Nuggets.
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Something changed on Jan. 10.
Since then, the Trail Blazers have gone on a blistering hot stretch, going 15-3 in their last 18 games, and their six straight wins is the longest active streak in the NBA. The biggest reason for this turnaround is most certainly point guard Damian Lillard.
Lillard is on track to post career highs by a wide margin in both points and assists this season, averaging 25.1 points and 7.2 assists per game, but his past five games have been truly surreal.
He has scored 30 points or more in five straight games, including an astonishing 51-point outing in a riotous 137-105 victory against the Golden State Warriors on Feb. 19, the first game back after an All Star Game he was snubbed from.
In Lillard’s last five games, he is averaging 35.8 points per game on shooting splits of .495/.436/.849, and he’s adding six assists per game in that span.
No less significantly, Lillard has a stellar net rating. According to NBA.com/stats, the Trail Blazers are outscoring their opponents by 21.2 points per 100 possessions when he’s on the floor in those past five games. It’s worth noting that this remarkable net rating is not necessarily a flash in the pan. In the Blazers last 15 games, they have a net rating of plus-12 when Lillard is on the floor.
There is only one MVP this season, and that’s certainly Stephen Curry of the Warriors. Curry is on track to have one of the greatest seasons in NBA history, if not indeed the very best ever.
There’s no overcoming that Goliath of a superstar this season for the rest of the NBA if he stays healthy, but if there was an award for second place, Lillard would be vaulting into the competition.
The very fact that the Blazers have flung open the door and crashed the playoff party in the Western Conference is astonishing, but it’s not hard to find the reason.
The Blazers are currently in a sixth-place tie with the Dallas Mavericks, and are just two games behind the sure-to-be doomed Memphis Grizzlies, who will be without center Marc Gasol for the rest of the season following surgery on his broken foot.
Suddenly, the Portland Trail Blazers, the team expected to be the West’s doormat, have the rosiest outlook of the bottom four teams in the conference’s playoff bracket.
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It’s scarcely fathomable, but the Blazers have Dame Lillard, basketball’s hottest player, to thank for this unbelievable resurgence into a position of playoff relevance.