You can push your chips on red, or you can stack them on black, but I’m going all-in on zero. I’m betting on Dame.
I’m talking about Big Game Dame, Logo Lillard, Dame D.O.L.L.A., the man nicknamed “Dame Time” because he commands its very fabric to perform miracles in under a second. The guy who can drop 60 on any given night, the guy who refuses to let something as trivial as a global pandemic keep him from the playoffs, the guy who carried the franchise on his back for its most successful run this
century.
I’m talking about Damian Lillard, one of the top 75 players of all time.
Ever since the prodigal son announced his return to the Portland Trail Blazers, a comeback story was made destiny; injury rehab can only delay the inevitable for so long. Damian Lillard is a Blazer once again and I believe better moments are ahead.
Here’s why.
Wood on the Fire
Damian Lillard has a preternatural ability to channel negative energy into weekslong flamethrower heaters that threaten to melt rims, save for the fact that his shots ignore them altogether, swishing cleanly.
He has a phrase he uses to describe what fuels these Super Saiyan transformations: “wood on the fire”, a motivational tool he picked up by watching the Hall of Fame acceptance speech from Michael “And I took that personally” Jordan.
Losing the Big Sky Tournament Championship game? That’s “wood on the fire”. Getting cut from the USA National Team? That’s “wood on the fire”. Getting snubbed from the All-star game? You better believe that’s “wood on the fire”.
Take it from Dame himself, “It’s natural for me to play with a chip on my shoulder, because of where I come from.”
Adversity, failure, and skepticism stoke the flame burning inside Lillard and he has a year’s worth of kindling piled up, waiting to be sparked by opening night tip-off.
The only reason he’s even back here in Portland is because his last team, the Milwaukee Bucks, decided they would rather pay him tens of millions of dollars to NOT play for them. That two-year run with the Bucks, when he paired up with former MVP Giannis Antetokounmpo, yielded a grand total of two first round exits, both at the hands of the Indiana Pacers.
The catalyst, of course, for Milwaukee’s unceremonious dismissal was the Achilles tear Dame suffered in the first round of the 2025 playoffs. Lillard is coming back from a severe injury after a yearlong rehab in his age-36 season, inviting questions of whether or not he can regain any semblance of his previous form.
Objectively, there’s every reason to harbour doubt, to wonder what shadow of his former self awaits, but I have witnessed too many of Damian Lillard’s best stretches come in the face of long odds to join the chorus of disbelief. Dame has plenty of wood on the fire going into this season; none of it from me. I’m a clear-eyed zealot, a harbinger of reckoning, the local town crier.
Dame is coming. The player known for taking ownership of time is prepared to turn back the clock for a vintage performance.
Coaching
Even prior to Micah Nori being hired as head coach, he tossed another log onto Dame’s motivational flame during his job interview, which Lillard attended, by proposing a 24-minute bench role for the returning star.
As if.
The nerve it took to say that in front of Dame belied the status of a candidate in search of his first chance at a lead role, but the bold move helped win him the gig. Since then, witnessing Lillard’s relentless workouts first-hand has proven to the new coach that Dame is 100% healthy, leaving Nori no choice but to name him a starter. A challenge dished out and accepted.
Micah Nori is every bit the underdog Dame is. The Blazers new head coach spent seventeen years in the NBA as an assistant, slowly working and grinding his way up from the bottom of the ranks. His highest profile moment came when he stepped in for an injured Chris Finch, patrolled the sidelines for the Minnesota Timberwolves, and helped lead them to victory in a 7-game series against the defending champion Denver Nuggets in the 2024 playoffs.
Following the interim stint, Micah Nori earned an interview for a head coaching position that offseason, but was passed over. His first rejection wasn’t the last; Nori was turned down six other times. He isn’t a big-name former player who’s easy to sell to a fanbase, and he’s simultaneously too novice to be a safe hire, while too much of a veteran to be a splashy, young one.
He finally got his shot after a war of attrition head coaching search that left Portland as the only vacancy available. The field of candidates winnowed down after the Bucks, Pelicans, Magic, Bulls, and Mavericks filled their roles, leaving Nori the lone one standing, like an unathletic kid getting picked last at recess.
His reward for winning the Blazers job? A contract well below the market rate, a comparatively cheap low-ball offer for three years with only one of them guaranteed. If Portland doesn’t meet expectations this season, it’s a very real possibility that Nori ends up looking for a job again next year, only he’ll be submitting his resume for assistant positions. First-time head coaches who flame out after one year don’t often get another chance.
So now, the Blazers pair a star player with everything to prove alongside a head coach with just as much on the line. A coach motivated to prove the teams who passed on him wrong, prove to the entire NBA he belonged all along, and prove to a stingy owner that he deserves another year.
And More Coaching
Micah Nori won’t be alone on the bench. He brings with him a steadying force who he knows and trusts, someone he described as “a guy a lot like myself, who never played in the NBA, but got his break through hard work and is a great offensive-minded coach.”
He was talking about Jay Triano, who similar to Dame, is returning to Portland from a years-long absence, reuniting with the star point guard after coaching Lillard’s first four years in the NBA.
Triano hadn’t even been hired when Micah Nori told Dame that the offensive game plan was going to be a throwback, promising that “at the end of the game, we’re going to put you in diagonal-fist, just like Jay did, and do a little knockoff, and you’ll get to your step-back going left.”
The mere mention stoked memories of Terry Stotts pacing the sideline, yelling out a variation of fist while pumping his own, the play call freeing a young Damian Lillard for an off-the-bounce three or lay-in. Triano wrote a fist full of pages in that old playbook, so who better to script a Jay Triano-style offense than the original author?
In the 2015-16 season, his last with the Blazers, Triano was more magician than author, pulling a rabbit out of the hat by helping to orchestrate an offense that ranked sixth overall, despite the third and fourth options being Allen Crabbe and Al-Farouq Aminu, who averaged 10.3 and 10.2 points per game, respectively.
During the two seasons prior to that, when Dame was flanked by higher-caliber talent including All-Star forward LaMarcus Aldridge, Jay Triano had a hand in Blazer offenses that ranked second and ninth.
With Deni Avdija and company surrounding Dame, next year’s Blazers look like the more talented versions Triano coached. It’s not hard to imagine Clingan and Deni replacing Lopez and Aldridge as screeners in horns sets, Holiday running side pick-and-rolls with Clingan like Batum used to with Lopez, or Deni operating as a high post hub like Domanatas Sabonis did when Jay Triano designed the number one ranked Sacramento Kings offense in 2022-23.
Whatever the other options, I know the offense will feature a steady diet of pick-and-rolls. Jay Triano’s calling card is putting his best offensive players in spots where they’re most effective, and as the ball handler in pick-and-rolls, Dame is an absolute assassin.
Last season, after beating them in the first round, Wemby called out the Blazers for being “pretty straightforward”. With Jay Triano and Damian Lillard revamping it to a more multi-faceted approach, this year’s offense promises to be a complex riddle that’s much harder for opponents to solve.
The Big Man
There’s no player archetype Dame leverages to greater effect than a pick-and-roll partner with size who is willing to use it, and they don’t make them any bigger or more willing to throw their weight around than Donovan Clingan, whose screens threaten to eclipse the sun.
Lillard is at his scariest when he works around a hard pick set by a physical big man like Robin Lopez, Chris Kaman, or Jusuf Nurkic, guys who create enough space for him to get a good look at a pull-up above-the-break three. When Dame gets it going, it’s impossible to stop.
What to do then, when the guy setting the screen is such an on-court beast that they call him Cling-Kong?
Donovan Clingan is a monster in the streets, but an analytics darling in the (spread)sheets. On defense, impact metrics favor Clingan’s ability to defend the rim, deter drives in the paint, and rebound misses. On the other side of the floor, it’s his ability to create extra possessions with his league-leading offensive rebounding.
The advanced stats love affair with Clingan started back in his college days, when he was menacing the paint for two seasons at UConn, winning back-to-back NCAA championships. He earned a reputation as an intense competitor who played with an edge and stepped up when the games mattered most.
When we last saw Donovan Clingan, he definitely wasn’t stepping up when the games mattered most. His performance in the playoffs was so wooden and stiff, it gave the court splinters. It’s one thing to have a tough time against Victor Wembanyama, a generational wunderkind set to dominate the league for years, but when Luke freaking Kornet makes you look unplayable…
The biggest question facing Donovan Clingan going into this season is how he responds to something he hasn’t experienced much before: failure. In his young career, the Blazers have played better when Clingan is on the court, but during his playoff minutes against the Spurs, they got stomped.
I’ve seen how frustrated Clingan gets when he makes mistakes. If there’s stats that track on-court scowls, ball slaps, or yells-at-self per 36, I’m sure he leads the league. I can only imagine what a whole offseason of that looks like after faceplanting against the Spurs. If Dame can teach him how to channel that energy into his own Super Saiyan transformation, look out.
As it stands, Lillard has a pick-and-roll partner in Clingan who sets incredible screens, can pop out for three, roll hard for a dunk, facilitate on a short roll, or just go down and fight for the offensive rebound on any of Lillard’s misses.
The two-man game between them will keep “Dame Time” from turning into a one-man show.
Defensive Help
I’ve already seen offseason practice reports about Dame’s improved defense. I might be delusional enough to believe Lillard will come back from his injury and be just as good as he ever was, but I haven’t fallen so far down the rabbit hole that I think he’ll be better. And Dame has never been a positive on defense.
The good news is he doesn’t have to be. Lillard will share the floor with elite paint protectors (Donovan Clingan, Robert Williams) and versatile defenders willing to take tough point-of-attack assignments (Jrue Holiday, Deni Avdija, Toumani Camara, Sidy Cissoko).
The Blazers finished last season ranked fourteenth in DRtg, despite their historic amount of live-ball turnovers that constantly put the defense on its heels. Adding Dame’s careful management of ball-handling duties will no doubt help the turnover problem, which will create a butterfly effect that improves the defense. Portland also filled a lot of their guard minutes last year with shifts from Shaedon Sharpe and Caleb Love, who are much worse on defense than Dame.
The 2026 NBA Champion Knicks found a way to build the seventh ranked defense around a small guard who struggles on that end of the floor by surrounding him with the right personnel. I believe the pieces are in place for the Blazers to improve their own defense from last year and adding Dame will help.
The Counter
Stopping the Damian Lillard pick-and-roll will always be at the top of opponents’ scouting reports. The most surefire way to disrupt it? Sell out with blitzes and traps the moment he crosses midcourt.
The most historic example of this tactic working against a Dame-led offense is the Blazers’ 2018 first round playoff series against the New Orleans Pelicans. Portland was never able to come up with an answer and were swept 4-0, despite entering as the third seed. None of Dame’s teammates could take advantage of the four-on-three opportunity quick enough before the defense recovered.
Fortunately for the Blazers, their current roster has the perfect counter to any aggressive blitzes and traps: Deni Avdija, a massive ball handler who gets downhill so fast that his nickname is Turbo.
Deni is relentless, a human body blow who pounds defenses over and over again. He led the league in drives per game last season and when he gets going, he’s looking for contact, shooting the second-most free throw attempts.
Avdija’s tenacious nature was so effective last season that it earned him an All-Star bid. He will easily be the most talented Blazer teammate Dame has had since LaMarcus Aldridge left. Deni can do so many things on the court that it’s simpler for me to just list the only two things he isn’t very good at: dribbling with his left and shooting off the bounce. That’s it. Everything else is in his wheelhouse.
Deni was even able to produce in the postseason when he was the primary focus of the Spurs, one of the best defensive units in the league, meanwhile most of his teammates were busy being outclassed. It’s a feeling Dame is familiar with. His last playoff performance in a Blazer uniform was of the Super Saiyan variety, yet he was still eliminated in the first round.
When the Blazers make it to the playoffs, the two stars will be able to rely on each other to play at a high-level, no matter how good the defense. Deni Avdija and Damian Lillard will be a devastating one-two combination: the human body blow has found his knockout punch.
Fin
As a Blazer fan, there’s plenty to worry about this upcoming season. There’s the existential crisis of what it even means to root for a team threatening to relocate. There’s the wonky roster balance with too many guards and not enough forwards. There’s the whole “where the Hell does Ja Morant fit in all this?” of it all.
At the very bottom of the list of things to worry about is Damian Lillard, a consummate professional who rarely misses a chance to rise to the occasion. Right now, the moment calls for him to define the end of his illustrious career on his own terms, competing at the highest-level he can.
This won’t be some victory-lap for a washed-up has-been. The clock isn’t quite ready to tick past Dame Time.
Ever since it was first announced, I’ve seen a lot of reasons why Damian Lillard’s return can go wrong, but the Blazers have placed too many proper pieces around him, ensuring it will go right.
The stakes have never been higher and my money is on Dame.
