Ghosts of Damian Lillard Era Still Lingering for Trail Blazers

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — The second round of the annual Damian Lillard Homecoming Affair was not nearly as much of an event as last year’s edition.

Lillard did, of course, get the loudest cheers anyone has gotten at a Trail Blazers home game this season when the Milwaukee Bucks starters were introduced, as the franchise’s all-time leading scorer will continue to until his playing days are over. But all the trappings of this kind of game as a Major Event were absent. No tribute video, no special pregame press conference, no influx of national media parachuting in. Once everybody involved—Lillard, his former team, his current teammates, fans—has gone through the pageantry once, the sequel becomes just another game.

And almost exactly a year after the first time Lillard stepped on the Moda Center court as a visiting player, things are more or less the same with both teams as they were then.

The Bucks are still hanging in the Eastern Conference playoff race—a level below Cleveland and Boston if you were ranking title contenders, but lurking. The supporting cast behind Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo is probably not good enough to win three playoff series, but they’re scouring the market for upgrades ahead of next week’s trade deadline. They’re in the mix.

And the Blazers?

Just like a year ago, their performance on Lillard’s big night—once again their only nationally televised game of the season—was the best they’ve looked all year and their 125-112 victory over the Bucks is this season’s signature win.

Just like a year ago, the promise of some of the players they’ve picked up in the aftermath of Lillard’s exit was on display. Toumani Camara played as good of defense as anyone can on Antetokounmpo (who still finished with 39 points and 12 rebounds, as he does), Deandre Ayton had one of his best two-way performances of the season, Scoot Henderson had a strong third-quarter shift and Deni Avdija continued his outstanding recent run with a 30-point performance.

And just like a year ago, some of the last reminders of the Lillard era are still hanging around, preventing the organization from fully turning the page.

Anfernee Simons, Lillard’s protege, is still here and still starting ahead of Henderson, either for the next nine days or until the summer, whenever Joe Cronin is able to trade him. Simons had 25 points and seven assists on Tuesday against the Bucks. He certainly could have picked a worse game to showcase himself to potential trade suitors than the Blazers’ lone national game.

Jerami Grant, brought in during the summer of 2022 after Lillard pushed hard for the Blazers to trade for him, is still here until Cronin can find a team that wants to trade for the remaining three years and $102 million beyond this one on his contract. If he isn’t moved at the deadline, they’ll probably shut him down sometime after the All-Star break with some kind of nebulous injury, just as they did to close out the last year with Lillard and the first year without him.

Chauncey Billups, hired by former general manager Neil Olshey to coach the last incarnation of the Lillard-C.J. McCollum duo, is still here for two and a half more months.

And Matisse Thybulle, another would-be Lillard supporting player and fellow Aaron Goodwin client, is still here, too, although he has yet to play this season due to injury. If he can get on the floor sometime in the next week, maybe they can trade him before the deadline.

The ties to Lillard’s 11 seasons in Portland are dwindling, but the ones that are still around are still prominently on display. There’s a lot to like about their future, but the past is hard to fully shake.

I only got to see Lillard briefly on Tuesday night. This night wasn’t close to the circus last year was, but whenever he’s in town, he’s pulled in all sorts of directions, so I mostly left him alone outside of saying hi briefly and asking how his kids are.

Lillard does seem to be in a better place than he was a year ago, both basketball-wise and not. The ugliness of his split with the Blazers appears to slowly be thawing, too. Last year when he was in town, Lillard and Cronin still had not spoken following the unexpected trade to the Bucks after he had been publicly pushing to go to a different Eastern Conference team all summer. On Tuesday, the two at least shook hands and said hello (as captured by TNT cameras).

It will probably be a while before they’re as close again as they were when Lillard was here. But they appear to be back on speaking terms. I always figured (and wrote at the time) that they’d be fine eventually.

One thing that was true the day the trade happened in September of 2023 and is still true today is that both sides are better off the way things worked out than the way Lillard wanted things to work out. Avdija and Camara, the two most promising players the Blazers have to build around, are here either directly or indirectly as a result of the deals Cronin made with Milwaukee, Phoenix and Boston. Nothing the team Lillard wanted to go to could have offered would give the Blazers that foundation. And things aren’t going great there right now, either, if you hadn’t heard. Lillard is better off in Milwaukee than he would have been there.

Most of the drama of that summer and Lillard’s exit is in the past now. At some point soon, the pieces the Blazers have left over from that era will also be in the past. But they’re not at that point yet.