Since entering the NBA in the 2012 draft, Damian Lillard has established himself as the type of player who's exceedingly comfortable on big stages and in pressure-packed moments, especially when the clock's ticking down in the closing seconds and he's got to make a play to deliver his Portland Trail Blazers a victory. He's become about as deadly a late-game option as the NBA has to offer, delivering dagger after dagger. (After dagger after dagger after big huge giant flippin' dagger.)
Sometimes, Lillard throws those daggers, like some kind of Colin Farrell-as-Bullseye, from a couple of steps behind the 3-point arc. Sometimes, though, he decides to get up close, like some kind of Colin Farrell-in-"In-Bruges," and end things right in your mug. The Los Angeles Lakers got just that sort of personal touch late in the fourth quarter on Sunday night:
We respect your desire to get up in Lillard's kitchen 40 feet away from the basket, Ronnie Price — especially after giving Dame off-ball space allowed Nicolas Batum to find him on a back-cut alley-oop earlier in the game, and especially after suffering a broken nose while taking a charge against these very same Blazers in a loss last Monday — but when you enter said kitchen, you have to be careful, lest you yourself wind up getting cooked. (And apparently Dame doesn't find the rim-protecting efforts of Jordan Hill and Ed Davis particularly intimidating.)
"At that point in the game, I knew it was getting really physical. They had cut the lead down, so I knew I had to go strong and I did," Lillard said after the game, according to Joe Resnick of The Associated Press. "There was a perfect amount of space, and [Hill] jumped late."
Clearly.
Lillard's loud and-one throwdown pushed Portland's lead to nine with 1:04 remaining and effectively put a tidy bow on a 106-94 win that marks the Blazers' fourth straight W, their eighth in their last nine games, and their 17th in 21 contests since the start of December. That such a scintillating run of form hasn't led them to the top of the Western Conference only goes to show just how good the Golden State Warriors have been; as it stands, the Blazers find themselves just one game back of Golden State for the top spot in the conference, and also as the first team in the NBA to reach 30 wins this season. The Lakers, on the other hand, fell for the third time in four games to drop to 12-26, the second-worst record in the West, ahead of only the bottoming-out Minnesota Timberwolves.
Byron Scott's club stayed within hailing distance for three quarters, and knotted the score at 75-all on a layup by Nick Young with just under 10 minutes remaining in the fourth. From there, though, Lillard took over, scoring eight points in 52 seconds to give the Blazers an 11-point lead with 7:22 left. When the Lakers made their last push, cutting their deficit to seven on a Wesley Johnson 3-pointer with 2:12 left, Lillard perked up again, scoring his team's final nine points over the final 87 seconds — including that emphatic tomahawk — to seal the victory.
He finished with 34 points on 13-for-23 shooting, including a 4-for-8 mark from 3-point land, to go with seven assists, three rebounds and three turnovers in 37 minutes. Seventeen of those points came in the final eight minutes and 16 seconds of the fourth quarter, an output remarkably similar to the 16-points-in-the-final-5:11 that he hung on L.A. in Portland's win last Monday, and a late-game explosion that's becoming an all-too-common sight for Blazers opponents. Lillard now has 232 fourth-quarter points this season, most in the NBA, with only Jamal Crawford of the Los Angeles Clippers (213), Kyrie Irving of the Cleveland Cavaliers (206) and Dwyane Wade of the Miami Heat (204) in his ballpark.
As we noted earlier, though, such late-game heroics aren't anything new for Lillard. According to Basketball-Reference.com's Shot Finder, Lillard's made 45 shots to either tie a game or take a lead in the final five minutes of contests since going pro, second only to Houston Rockets star James Harden (47) and a handful of makes ahead of LeBron James and Stephen Curry (40 each) over the past three seasons. It's at the point that, even when the ball doesn't bounce Portland's way, the calm and cool point guard out of the Bay by way of Weber State is just about the last person any opponent wants to see with the ball in his hands and grains of sand left in the hourglass.
And yet, as Lillard sees it, his predilection toward taking over and propelling Portland past the finish line isn't about continually proving and re-emphasizing to everyone that he's the man, as he told Bleacher Report's Kevin Ding last week:
"When you try to make everything about yourself, that's hero ball,"Lillard said. "Not when you just happen to be the guy to make a few shots and give energy and get the team going."
And once Terry Stotts' Blazers get going, they're capable of producing some pretty brilliant basketball, as evidenced by this dynamite offensive possession from the third quarter captured by CBS Sports' James Herbert:
Off a broken play, all five Blazers touch the ball in the space of four seconds, with Chris Kaman — whose versatile offensive game has been exactly what Neil Olshey hoped for when he signed the reserve center in free agency — passing up a bunny on the interior to set Wesley Matthews up for an wide-open in-rhythm 3-pointer. It's a trip that recalls the defending champion San Antonio Spurs' "good-to-great" playmaking ethos — sure, you might be able to get off a decent shot, but if you keep moving the ball and making the defense shift, you're probably going to be able to find an even better one, so let's not settle — and one that indicates just how well the Blazers are operating these days, with an offense that ranks eighth in the NBA in points scored per possession and, more importantly, a very stingy third in points allowed per possession.
Stotts' charges are sharing both ball and burden as they look to build on last season's second-round playoff run. If they keep it up, led by their unflappable All-Star point guard, these Blazers won't be the West's "best-kept secret" very much longer.
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don't Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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