After turning heads at the start of the season with a 4-2 start, the Portland Trail Blazers are in the midst of a rough patch — losers of 6 of their last 7 as injuries pile up. But Blazers superstar Damian Lillard has been offering perspective to his teammates during the two-week skid to help them stay patient and keep hope through the struggles, according to reporting from The Athletic’s Jason Quick
.The Blazers keeping hope — and Lillard’s tutelage in the process while he’s out with a torn Achilles
— is the main subject of the latest story from the long-time Blazers writer. Quick writes about how Lillard has relied on his own experience of ups and downs over his 13-year career to speak to the team from a place of stature and plant “seeds of wisdom.”
“I told these dudes: this is the time when you find your true identity,” Lillard said. “It’s not when you win a couple games and everything feels good. It’s in the moments when it would be easy to walk away — like now, we have some injuries, a rough patch, a tough schedule — but this is the time when you make a decision to march forward and up.”
Lillard was quick to point out that what the Blazers are going through now — the injuries, their coach being placed on leave amid a gambling probe, two buzzer-beating losses — won’t be solved by any rah-rah, inspirational speech from him. The turnaround has to come from within by building good habits, supporting each other, and trusting that hard work produces good results.
“Hey, we might lose five more games, but what matters is not what we say to the media,” Lillard said. “it’s how we walk into the locker room and talk to each other, or whether we get to practice and it’s quiet and nobody says anything … like, you gotta have that feeling of ‘Man, this sucks.’ But you have to have the actions of ‘this is not breaking me.’
Quick writes that Lillard and the Blazers’ breakthrough 2018-19 season, which only came to fruition after an embarrassing first-round playoff sweep the year before, can lend hope and lessons to this current Blazers team. He includes many more quotes, insights and scenes to explain that connection.
The Athletic requires a subscription, but the NBA has posted the piece on its website, so you can read it in full here.
