On Tuesday night, the Portland Trail Blazers saw its 24-point lead in the third quarter drop to a five-point deficit with just over four minutes to play. This is what the NBA defines as clutch time – a game within five points with less than five minutes remaining. They should simply rename it, officially, Dame Time.
In the next three minutes, Lillard once again pulled the Blazers off the ropes before launching a hay volley to the sound of six three-point stitches – four of his own as he broke down the defense and found Gary Trent Jr. and Robert Covington for more. two, while Portland defeated the Thunder 115-104 for their fifth consecutive victory. This setback in relation to Lu Dort, who effectively ended the game, was totally comical.
Lillard did the same thing with Dallas on Sunday, scoring seven points in a one-minute period to snatch victory for the Mavs, who had erased a deficit of 13 points in the fourth period. This setback proved to be the winner with 32 seconds remaining.
These sequences serve as a microcosm for the current state of the Blazers: Struggling to stay afloat, rescued by Lillard, who is back to his superhero methods of keeping Portland in the middle of the Western Conference playoff, despite injuries in CJ McCollum and Jusuf Nurkic.
After Tuesday’s victory, Portland sits as No. 4 seed in the west at 17-10 (this would be good enough for the second seed in the east, but that’s another complaint for another day). It seems like a small miracle, considering that the Blazers are a defensive doormat and McCollum and Nurkic together lost 29 games. It seems that a four-game losing streak is always lurking.
But Lillard is simply not going to let that happen. Blazers operate on a narrow margin with more than half of their games so far meeting the NBA’s “clutch” criteria – again, that means five points with less than five minutes to play. In those clutching minutes, Lillard now scored 74 points in total, the best in the league, while kicking 60 percent of the field, 56 percent from 3 and 100 percent (23 to 23) from the free-throw line. The Blazers, more importantly, were 11-3 in those simple games with a difference of more than 40 points.
Kyrie Irving recently lamented that all the odds are against the Nets. Yes, he said that honestly. A team with Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden is apparently swimming against the current. If Kyrie wants to know what swimming is really like to avoid being sucked into the whirlwind of the Western Conference, he should take a look at Lillard’s situation. With McCollum and Nurkic out, Lillard’s second best player is Gary Trent Jr.
If you want to make Lillard’s MVP case, which is becoming impossible to ignore, this would be a good place to start. The only player in the MVP conversation at the moment who is playing with less current talent is Stephen Curry, and even he may have a better squad than Portland is playing right now.
Nikola Jokic is at the top or near the top of everyone’s MVP list, although Lillard ranks higher on ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus, and even with Nuggets, with a much better squad than Portland at the moment, they are now two games worse than the Blazers after falling to the Celtics on Tuesday night. Giannis Antetokounmpo’s Bucks, a loaded squad, also have a worse track record than the Blazers. Joel Embiid has Ben Simmons and Tobias Harris and the Sixers are still halfway through Portland. LeBron James has, well, the Lakers.
It cannot be overstated that Lillard is doing this without McCollum, whose absence was particularly felt. He was having a career year and, with him alongside Lillard, the Blazers were a terror at the end of the games with two of the best self-creating closings in the world on the same backcourt – No. 5 in both goals from the fourth period and differential point. With Lillard going alone, those ranks, entering Tuesday, dropped to 24th and 29th, respectively.
This is a statistical way of saying that Blazers are making a habit of allowing big tracks in the third quarter to evaporate, as they did at OKC, or digging big holes in the fourth quarter. But so far, Lillard has been there to get them out. According to ESPN statistics and information, that 3-point hitting Lillard against Dallas was his 33rd career win with less than a minute to play, which is the highest in the league since he arrived in 2012-13.
There was a conversation about Lillard cargo management going on in Blazers circles. In essence, the argument for not pushing Lillard too much is that the Blazers’ season looked on the verge of death when McCollum and Nurkic fell. But Lillard has stayed alive, 8-5 since McCollum fell and 7-2 in the last nine.
You cannot sit Lillard now. More than 27 games coming in on Tuesday, the Blazers beat their opponents from 3,117 to 3,099. Do the math and that’s an 18 point spread, or about 0.66 points per game. This is a bucket. A free throw. Portland’s margin of error is almost nonexistent, and Lillard scores those decisive points at a level that few, if any, players can match.
People will say that Lillard ran out in the playoffs last season, and if Terry Stotts doesn’t want that to happen again this season, it’s better to think about the future. To begin with, I’m not sure if Lillard has completely run out. He eliminated the Lakers in Game 1. The Lakers were awesome in the end.
But if he ran out a little, I would attribute that to Michael Johnson’s two-week 200-meter sprint that he had to go through just to get Portland into the play-in series against Memphis. If the Blazers manage to continue winning at a decent rate until McCollum and Nurkic return, they may find themselves with enough cushioning not to have to score Lillard in the final stretch and end with a more viable first-round series.
From there, you take the risk. And with a healthy Lillard, McCollum and Nurkic, and a personal defense to perhaps play above your statistical profile depending on the playoff confrontation, these are not the worst chances in the world.