tlongII
11-26-2012, 09:56 AM
http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nba/2012/11/21/lillard-re-engergizing-portland/1720517/
The rookie from Weber State is making a name for himself as the leader of the Portland Trail Blazers
2:47PM EST November 23. 2012 - The billboard that once featured a smiling Greg Oden and Brandon Roy across the street from the Rose Garden is gone, replaced by an ad for a local country music station that sits next to the train tracks that cut through the heart of downtown Portland, Ore.
And isn't that just about right?
The former Portland Trail Blazers pillars whose careers have been decimated by knee injuries are more than worthy of a sad song – the hoops version of dogs dying and wives leaving and such. Their stories may as well have unfolded with violin accompaniment in the background, the seemingly-endless ailments to them and others sending a fanbase's championship dreams to the bottom of the nearby Willamette River.
ROOKIES: Jared Sullinger takes lessons from Kevin Garnett
They have a new poster boy, though. And hope is floating again.
Rookie point guard Damian Lillard is re-energizing the City of Roses this season, his poise and prowess making him an instant favorite among one of the league's most loyal fans. His path from being an overlooked prospect in Oakland, Calif. to mid-major Weber State to NBA prominence already is leading him to the league's record books. Through 10 games, Lillard – who was taken sixth overall by the Blazers in the June draft – has joined the NBA Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson and Isiah Thomas as the only rookies to have averaged at least 19 points and six assists per game to this point in their debut seasons.
He's speeding up what was supposed to be a slow learning curve and is threatening to turn the Blazers into a contender in what was expected to be a rebuilding year. Lillard was supposed to be getting acquainted with franchise centerpiece forward LaMarcus Aldridge, small forward Nicolas Batum and the rest of the Blazers. Instead, Portland is 5-5 with their Rookie of the Year frontrunner running the show heading into tonight's game at Phoenix. Lillard - who wasn't heavily recruited in high school, in part, because he played on the less-prominent AAU team in town but who went on to become the second-leading scorer in the NCAA as a junior at Weber State (24.5 points per game) – swears he isn't stunned by his early impact.
"I said it the whole draft process, and all through summer league – I'm not surprised by it because I believe in myself and I know that I worked hard to put myself in a position to be successful," Lillard, 22, who stands 6-foot-3 and weighs 195 pounds, told USA TODAY Sports. "When you know you have that body of work, then you just believe that you're supposed to be in the position that you are. So I'm not surprised by it."
And therein lies the Lillard way.
It's not just a matter of what he has done that's captured the attention of so many, though, but how he has done it. Lillard, who hails from the unforgiving land of gritty point guards like Jason Kidd, Gary Payton and Brian Shaw but refined his game during four years of relative solitude in Ogden, Utah, has a compelling composure and fearless manner not often seen in rookies. His is a quiet confidence, one born out of a childhood spent striving to be different in all the right ways.
Lillard was surrounded by struggle growing up in Oakland - the "other" city by the Bay where he played at the same St. Joseph's High School as Kidd during his first two prep seasons but transferred to Oakland High as a junior because of a lack of playing time. He had comfort at home, where his father, Houston, and his mother, Gina, were able to provide so much more than most of Lillard's friends were afforded and the standards were raised on the basketball court as well.
When his father wasn't working for the local box company, he was a trainer of sorts for Damian and his older brother (also named Houston) who would preach about the value of offensive versatility. Long before the Sunday game in which Chicago Bulls players griped about Lillard's rookie mistake in which he dunked the ball in the closing, irrelevant, seconds of a Blazers win, his father had implemented a no dunking rule on their adjustable rim that they were never allowed to lower.
He forced the right-handed boys to shoot only left-handed in their endless games of H-O-R-S-E, planting the seeds of creativity that helped him grow into a versatile scorer with a smooth stroke. Years later, his Weber State coach, Randy Rahe, raised the bar when he installed a pick-and-roll heavy system that is prevalent in the NBA and sped up his professional development as a result.
The professional payoff so far? The tenacious Lillard is scoring from inside and out like he always has (19 points per game on 44.7% percent shooting overall and 38.7% from three-point range on an average of 6.2 attempts) and finding his teammates (6.1 assists per game).
As for the poise for which Lillard is already so well known, he says it's all a matter of perspective. Being robbed at gunpoint by three men while waiting for the bus like he was during his senior year of high school, he'll admit, was enough to rattle him. A fourth-quarter with a game on the line, he has made it clear, does not.
First-year Blazers general manager Neil Olshey had seen the skills and sensed those qualities while scouting Lillard in his previous GM job with the Clippers, back before he took over a team that was 28-38 last season and fell in the first round of the playoffs in the two seasons prior. He became even more of a Lillard believer when he ramped up his research after joining the Blazers in early June.
Olshey, who traded for Chris Paul last December and thus was the resident expert when it came to this notion of dynamic point guards transforming franchises, officially fell for Lillard during their pre-draft drive to The Lake Oswego Grill to meet with team owner Paul Allen and the team's entire front-office staff.
"I drove him to dinner that night, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot I thought, 'This is a no-brainer,'" said Olshey, who will have between $11.8 million and $13 million in cap space this summer to add to his roster. "Then after watching him spend two hours with eight guys from our front office and Paul Allen, and the way that he handled himself, he just became the kind of person that you wanted to be a part of your organization. His composure and maturity was just unparalleled relative to the other guys we brought in during the pre-draft process. You knew he wasn't going to get rattled in an NBA game.
"Even watching him in Chicago (at pre-draft camp), here are all these guys with big reputations and from big schools and McDonald's All-Americans, and he walked around the gym and carried himself with such gravitas that you said, 'You know what? This is a guy we can hand the ball to on Day One, and there will be some bumps in the road, but this is our guy.'"
Early though it may be, Lillard is looking like the latest addition to the league's legion of impressive point guards. Olshey sees more Chauncey Billups in Lillard as a leader and a player than he does Paul. Some have compared Lillard's attacking skills with those of Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook, but first-year Portland assistant coach David Vanterpool - who joined Blazers head coach Terry Stotts this season after spending the last two with the Thunder in a scouting and personnel role - said Lillard is well ahead of Westbrook when it comes to making plays for others.
"He's a point guard through and through," Vanterpool said.
Westbrook entered the league out of UCLA as the sort of relentless defender that Lillard and most others are not, but he's smart enough to know that Kidd or Payton will come after him unless he continues to take pride on that end as well. Lillard has said that he studied tapes of Chicago's Derrick Rose, too, and defensive guru/Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau recently deemed him "very impressive" and said "his skill set makes him very hard to guard." Lest Lillard need more motivation to keep turning heads, there's this: Robertson, who is now 73, had never heard of him before politely declining an interview with USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday to discuss the young player with whom he's shared so many recent sentences.
Still, Lillard has held his own against many of the top point guards in today's game already.
After a 23-point, 11-assist debut against the Lakers on Oct. 31 (a win) in which he became the first player to finish with at least 21 points and nine assists in his first NBA game since LeBron James did it on Oct. 29, 2003 and joined Robertson and Thomas as the only players in NBA history to record at least 20 points and 10 assists in their NBA openers, Lillard just kept going.
On Nov. 2, Lillard had 21 points and seven assists against Westbrook in a loss to the Thunder (though Westbrook had 32 and six).
On Nov. 3, Lillard had 20 points (eight in overtime) and nine assists against Houston's Jeremy Lin in a win (Lin had 13 and seven).
On Nov. 8, he had 16 points and four assists again Paul (who had 21 and six) in a loss to the Clippers.
On Friday, Lillard had a career-high 27 points and five assists in another overtime win over Houston. This time, Lin had 11 points and 11 assists but was supplanted by Toney Douglas late when substitute Rockets coach Kelvin Sampson was searching for answers.
Lillard has embraced the early challenges with the same sort of bold approach he's long been known for.
"When those guys came into the league, they weren't who they are," he said of the league's most respected point guards. "There were guys that baptized them. They might have had to have a few rough nights against the best point guards in the league, and they didn't back down from them.
"I'm not taking anything away from them, but when I play against them I'm not going to back down because of their name. I want them to come on the court and show me why everybody is saying, 'He's this and he's that.'
Yet ironically, it was one of Lillard's rare off-nights that said so much about how much better he may become. Facing Dallas at the American Airlines Center on Nov. 5, he was overwhelmed by Rick Carlisle's blitzing scheme and ruthless traps that forced him into a 2-of-13 outing from the field and a 13-point, five-assist outing in all. As Lillard approached the team plane headed back for Portland that night, he made it clear to Vanterpool that he wouldn't be wasting any time before trying to fix what had gone wrong.
"So I said, 'I'm going to break down the down the video and we'll look at it tomorrow and figure out what happened,'" Vanterpool said. "Then he was like, 'No, we're watching that on the plane.' He didn't really ask me. He was like, 'No, we're watching that on plane.'
"We got deep into the flight and he wanted to watch it again. Then I was showing him some other film from other games and other situations, and he was knee-deep into all of that. That speaks to a guy where it's not about any of this other stuff, as far as these interviews or the fame or everything that comes with it. It's just about getting better and wanting to be the best basketball player he can be."
Lillard and his coaches are sure that this is just the beginning for him and these Blazers, that this new point guard who has led them so well so far is no fluke.
"People really need to realize that 'Dame' isn't really even comfortable yet," Vanterpool said. "All this is new to him. Most of the guys he's facing are new to him, the situation as far as having to really, really facilitate (for others) all the time is kind of new to him.
"It's thinking the game, understanding situations, basically driving the bus of our offense, driving the bus of the rest of the team, and defensively sometimes. Being able to know where his spots are, spots that will be open on the court in certain situations. It's a chess match…The game is moving fast, and he's moving at a speed just as fast as that, and if he slows himself down and is sort of like Neo in the Matrix – where everything comes a little bit more clear for him, he'll be special."
Lillard agreed that there is much work left to do.
"I think I can get a lot better," he said. "Defensively, it's just getting familiar with NBA offenses and just the schemes that are popular around the league. I can be better defensively. Offensively, I think my reads will get better with time. When I watch film, I see I miss guys – not always like a wide-open pass but something that can lead to a better play. Keeping my dribble alive, getting a better middle game with floaters and finishing around the rim. There's a lot of ways for me to get better, and that's the exciting part."
There's no billboard of Lillard just yet, but there are more than enough YouTube clips of him to help the Blazers faithful feel good again. The Oden chapter is behind them, as the No. 1 pick in the 2007 draft was released in March after undergoing three microfracture surgeries (two on his left knee, one on his right). Roy retired last December because of persistent pain and a lack of cartilage in both of his knees, then re-emerged in the summer when he signed with Minnesota.
His saga is still going, though, as he will miss what would have been the first reunion game in Portland on Friday because of an arthroscopic knee surgery performed on Monday that is expected to keep him out a month. Meanwhile the Blazers, hexed for so long by the most devastating of injury bugs, have been among the healthiest teams in the NBA this season.
Lillard is taking the slow-and-steady approach to his new NBA life in Portland, as his mother and 15-year-old sister, Lanae, are living with him in a rented house to assist during his time of transition. There's a big picture in play here, too, and he doesn't want it changing anytime soon.
"I've tried to really focus myself one day at a time because it's a long season," Lillard said. "I don't want to stress myself out or get my head moving too fast thinking too far out in the future. I'm just trying to come every day, trying to soak everything up and learn and do what I can do to help the team. But I think we can be a really good team…We just need to figure it out."
The rookie from Weber State is making a name for himself as the leader of the Portland Trail Blazers
2:47PM EST November 23. 2012 - The billboard that once featured a smiling Greg Oden and Brandon Roy across the street from the Rose Garden is gone, replaced by an ad for a local country music station that sits next to the train tracks that cut through the heart of downtown Portland, Ore.
And isn't that just about right?
The former Portland Trail Blazers pillars whose careers have been decimated by knee injuries are more than worthy of a sad song – the hoops version of dogs dying and wives leaving and such. Their stories may as well have unfolded with violin accompaniment in the background, the seemingly-endless ailments to them and others sending a fanbase's championship dreams to the bottom of the nearby Willamette River.
ROOKIES: Jared Sullinger takes lessons from Kevin Garnett
They have a new poster boy, though. And hope is floating again.
Rookie point guard Damian Lillard is re-energizing the City of Roses this season, his poise and prowess making him an instant favorite among one of the league's most loyal fans. His path from being an overlooked prospect in Oakland, Calif. to mid-major Weber State to NBA prominence already is leading him to the league's record books. Through 10 games, Lillard – who was taken sixth overall by the Blazers in the June draft – has joined the NBA Hall of Famers Oscar Robertson and Isiah Thomas as the only rookies to have averaged at least 19 points and six assists per game to this point in their debut seasons.
He's speeding up what was supposed to be a slow learning curve and is threatening to turn the Blazers into a contender in what was expected to be a rebuilding year. Lillard was supposed to be getting acquainted with franchise centerpiece forward LaMarcus Aldridge, small forward Nicolas Batum and the rest of the Blazers. Instead, Portland is 5-5 with their Rookie of the Year frontrunner running the show heading into tonight's game at Phoenix. Lillard - who wasn't heavily recruited in high school, in part, because he played on the less-prominent AAU team in town but who went on to become the second-leading scorer in the NCAA as a junior at Weber State (24.5 points per game) – swears he isn't stunned by his early impact.
"I said it the whole draft process, and all through summer league – I'm not surprised by it because I believe in myself and I know that I worked hard to put myself in a position to be successful," Lillard, 22, who stands 6-foot-3 and weighs 195 pounds, told USA TODAY Sports. "When you know you have that body of work, then you just believe that you're supposed to be in the position that you are. So I'm not surprised by it."
And therein lies the Lillard way.
It's not just a matter of what he has done that's captured the attention of so many, though, but how he has done it. Lillard, who hails from the unforgiving land of gritty point guards like Jason Kidd, Gary Payton and Brian Shaw but refined his game during four years of relative solitude in Ogden, Utah, has a compelling composure and fearless manner not often seen in rookies. His is a quiet confidence, one born out of a childhood spent striving to be different in all the right ways.
Lillard was surrounded by struggle growing up in Oakland - the "other" city by the Bay where he played at the same St. Joseph's High School as Kidd during his first two prep seasons but transferred to Oakland High as a junior because of a lack of playing time. He had comfort at home, where his father, Houston, and his mother, Gina, were able to provide so much more than most of Lillard's friends were afforded and the standards were raised on the basketball court as well.
When his father wasn't working for the local box company, he was a trainer of sorts for Damian and his older brother (also named Houston) who would preach about the value of offensive versatility. Long before the Sunday game in which Chicago Bulls players griped about Lillard's rookie mistake in which he dunked the ball in the closing, irrelevant, seconds of a Blazers win, his father had implemented a no dunking rule on their adjustable rim that they were never allowed to lower.
He forced the right-handed boys to shoot only left-handed in their endless games of H-O-R-S-E, planting the seeds of creativity that helped him grow into a versatile scorer with a smooth stroke. Years later, his Weber State coach, Randy Rahe, raised the bar when he installed a pick-and-roll heavy system that is prevalent in the NBA and sped up his professional development as a result.
The professional payoff so far? The tenacious Lillard is scoring from inside and out like he always has (19 points per game on 44.7% percent shooting overall and 38.7% from three-point range on an average of 6.2 attempts) and finding his teammates (6.1 assists per game).
As for the poise for which Lillard is already so well known, he says it's all a matter of perspective. Being robbed at gunpoint by three men while waiting for the bus like he was during his senior year of high school, he'll admit, was enough to rattle him. A fourth-quarter with a game on the line, he has made it clear, does not.
First-year Blazers general manager Neil Olshey had seen the skills and sensed those qualities while scouting Lillard in his previous GM job with the Clippers, back before he took over a team that was 28-38 last season and fell in the first round of the playoffs in the two seasons prior. He became even more of a Lillard believer when he ramped up his research after joining the Blazers in early June.
Olshey, who traded for Chris Paul last December and thus was the resident expert when it came to this notion of dynamic point guards transforming franchises, officially fell for Lillard during their pre-draft drive to The Lake Oswego Grill to meet with team owner Paul Allen and the team's entire front-office staff.
"I drove him to dinner that night, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot I thought, 'This is a no-brainer,'" said Olshey, who will have between $11.8 million and $13 million in cap space this summer to add to his roster. "Then after watching him spend two hours with eight guys from our front office and Paul Allen, and the way that he handled himself, he just became the kind of person that you wanted to be a part of your organization. His composure and maturity was just unparalleled relative to the other guys we brought in during the pre-draft process. You knew he wasn't going to get rattled in an NBA game.
"Even watching him in Chicago (at pre-draft camp), here are all these guys with big reputations and from big schools and McDonald's All-Americans, and he walked around the gym and carried himself with such gravitas that you said, 'You know what? This is a guy we can hand the ball to on Day One, and there will be some bumps in the road, but this is our guy.'"
Early though it may be, Lillard is looking like the latest addition to the league's legion of impressive point guards. Olshey sees more Chauncey Billups in Lillard as a leader and a player than he does Paul. Some have compared Lillard's attacking skills with those of Oklahoma City's Russell Westbrook, but first-year Portland assistant coach David Vanterpool - who joined Blazers head coach Terry Stotts this season after spending the last two with the Thunder in a scouting and personnel role - said Lillard is well ahead of Westbrook when it comes to making plays for others.
"He's a point guard through and through," Vanterpool said.
Westbrook entered the league out of UCLA as the sort of relentless defender that Lillard and most others are not, but he's smart enough to know that Kidd or Payton will come after him unless he continues to take pride on that end as well. Lillard has said that he studied tapes of Chicago's Derrick Rose, too, and defensive guru/Bulls coach Tom Thibodeau recently deemed him "very impressive" and said "his skill set makes him very hard to guard." Lest Lillard need more motivation to keep turning heads, there's this: Robertson, who is now 73, had never heard of him before politely declining an interview with USA TODAY Sports on Wednesday to discuss the young player with whom he's shared so many recent sentences.
Still, Lillard has held his own against many of the top point guards in today's game already.
After a 23-point, 11-assist debut against the Lakers on Oct. 31 (a win) in which he became the first player to finish with at least 21 points and nine assists in his first NBA game since LeBron James did it on Oct. 29, 2003 and joined Robertson and Thomas as the only players in NBA history to record at least 20 points and 10 assists in their NBA openers, Lillard just kept going.
On Nov. 2, Lillard had 21 points and seven assists against Westbrook in a loss to the Thunder (though Westbrook had 32 and six).
On Nov. 3, Lillard had 20 points (eight in overtime) and nine assists against Houston's Jeremy Lin in a win (Lin had 13 and seven).
On Nov. 8, he had 16 points and four assists again Paul (who had 21 and six) in a loss to the Clippers.
On Friday, Lillard had a career-high 27 points and five assists in another overtime win over Houston. This time, Lin had 11 points and 11 assists but was supplanted by Toney Douglas late when substitute Rockets coach Kelvin Sampson was searching for answers.
Lillard has embraced the early challenges with the same sort of bold approach he's long been known for.
"When those guys came into the league, they weren't who they are," he said of the league's most respected point guards. "There were guys that baptized them. They might have had to have a few rough nights against the best point guards in the league, and they didn't back down from them.
"I'm not taking anything away from them, but when I play against them I'm not going to back down because of their name. I want them to come on the court and show me why everybody is saying, 'He's this and he's that.'
Yet ironically, it was one of Lillard's rare off-nights that said so much about how much better he may become. Facing Dallas at the American Airlines Center on Nov. 5, he was overwhelmed by Rick Carlisle's blitzing scheme and ruthless traps that forced him into a 2-of-13 outing from the field and a 13-point, five-assist outing in all. As Lillard approached the team plane headed back for Portland that night, he made it clear to Vanterpool that he wouldn't be wasting any time before trying to fix what had gone wrong.
"So I said, 'I'm going to break down the down the video and we'll look at it tomorrow and figure out what happened,'" Vanterpool said. "Then he was like, 'No, we're watching that on the plane.' He didn't really ask me. He was like, 'No, we're watching that on plane.'
"We got deep into the flight and he wanted to watch it again. Then I was showing him some other film from other games and other situations, and he was knee-deep into all of that. That speaks to a guy where it's not about any of this other stuff, as far as these interviews or the fame or everything that comes with it. It's just about getting better and wanting to be the best basketball player he can be."
Lillard and his coaches are sure that this is just the beginning for him and these Blazers, that this new point guard who has led them so well so far is no fluke.
"People really need to realize that 'Dame' isn't really even comfortable yet," Vanterpool said. "All this is new to him. Most of the guys he's facing are new to him, the situation as far as having to really, really facilitate (for others) all the time is kind of new to him.
"It's thinking the game, understanding situations, basically driving the bus of our offense, driving the bus of the rest of the team, and defensively sometimes. Being able to know where his spots are, spots that will be open on the court in certain situations. It's a chess match…The game is moving fast, and he's moving at a speed just as fast as that, and if he slows himself down and is sort of like Neo in the Matrix – where everything comes a little bit more clear for him, he'll be special."
Lillard agreed that there is much work left to do.
"I think I can get a lot better," he said. "Defensively, it's just getting familiar with NBA offenses and just the schemes that are popular around the league. I can be better defensively. Offensively, I think my reads will get better with time. When I watch film, I see I miss guys – not always like a wide-open pass but something that can lead to a better play. Keeping my dribble alive, getting a better middle game with floaters and finishing around the rim. There's a lot of ways for me to get better, and that's the exciting part."
There's no billboard of Lillard just yet, but there are more than enough YouTube clips of him to help the Blazers faithful feel good again. The Oden chapter is behind them, as the No. 1 pick in the 2007 draft was released in March after undergoing three microfracture surgeries (two on his left knee, one on his right). Roy retired last December because of persistent pain and a lack of cartilage in both of his knees, then re-emerged in the summer when he signed with Minnesota.
His saga is still going, though, as he will miss what would have been the first reunion game in Portland on Friday because of an arthroscopic knee surgery performed on Monday that is expected to keep him out a month. Meanwhile the Blazers, hexed for so long by the most devastating of injury bugs, have been among the healthiest teams in the NBA this season.
Lillard is taking the slow-and-steady approach to his new NBA life in Portland, as his mother and 15-year-old sister, Lanae, are living with him in a rented house to assist during his time of transition. There's a big picture in play here, too, and he doesn't want it changing anytime soon.
"I've tried to really focus myself one day at a time because it's a long season," Lillard said. "I don't want to stress myself out or get my head moving too fast thinking too far out in the future. I'm just trying to come every day, trying to soak everything up and learn and do what I can do to help the team. But I think we can be a really good team…We just need to figure it out."