Damian Lillard on his defenseless Blazers: 'This s*** is ridiculous'
After his Portland Trail Blazers got annihilated by the Golden State Warriors for the second time this season — this time, by an NBA season-high-margin of 45 points — Blazers point guard Damian Lillard responded to the embarrassing blowout loss by insisting he was not overly concerned.
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“It’s not our job to worry like it is for [the media] and the people outside of our locker room,” Lillard said, according to Mike Richman of The Oregonian. “I feel like we’re going to be fine. I truly believe that.”
And yet, after watching Kevin Durant roast Portland’s porous defense for 34 points on 11-for-13 shooting — and, perhaps even more notably, seeing reserve guard Ian Clark torch the Trail Blazers for 23 points on 9-for-11 shooting in 21 1/2 minutes off the Dubs’ bench — Dame’s confidence could scarcely cover over his anger and frustration. From Chris Haynes of ESPN.com:
Damian Lillard didn’t mince words in criticizing his team, telling ESPN the Blazers’ performance was “ridiculous” and that the team’s recent slide “is on us,” not the coaches.
“Man, it’s OK to turn the ball over, it’s OK to make mistakes, but we have to play with some damn heart and compete out there,” he said of his teammates. […]
“This isn’t about what the coaches are doing, this is on us,” Lillard said to ESPN in retelling what he stated to his teammates. “We have to take responsibility for what’s going on. This s— is ridiculous. We’ve got the talent; we’ve just got to put it together consistently.”
This isn’t the first time this season that Lillard has publicly called his team on the carpet for poor performance. Last month, after a blowout loss at the hands of James Harden and the Houston Rockets, Lillard summed up the Blazers’ sluggish start to the season by saying, “We kind of suck right now.” Things haven’t changed much since then; if anything, they’ve only gotten worse, as a team that looked in October like its biggest problem might be just being “pretty good” has found itself in disappointingly dire straits.
All season long, the Blazers have alternated brief bursts of solid play with frustrating stretches and seeming to take two steps back every time they manage to start moving in the right direction. Lillard wasn’t alone in airing the Blazers out — C.J. McCollum called their effort against Golden State “unacceptable,” and swingman Allen Crabbe termed it “embarrassing” — but through 29 games, the reality is that such punchless defense has been par for the course in Portland.
Under Terry Stotts, Portland has tended toward a conservative defensive style, forsaking cranked-up pressure aimed at disrupting opponents to force turnovers in favor of hanging back, limiting chances at the rim, guarding the 3-point line and trying to force contested 2-point looks. Last year, when the Blazers outpaced many pundits’ expectations by winning 44 games and making the second round of the playoffs, opponents shot 37.1 percent from long-range against them, which was tied for the third-highest percentage in the league. That damage was mitigated, though, by Portland allowing just 22.9 3-point attempts per game, ninth-fewest in the NBA. And while the 2015-16 Blazers didn’t employ a dominant shot-blocker or rim protector, they both kept opponents away from the front of the rim and limited their effectiveness once they got there, finishing tied for 11th among 30 teams in shots allowed within 5 feet of the basket and allowing the league’s fourth-lowest percentage on those looks.
Teams aren’t shooting significantly better against the Blazers in those high-value areas this year. Portland’s got the league’s third-best opposing field-goal percentage on attempts within 5 feet, and opponents are up 1 percentage point from last season against Lillard and company from beyond the arc. It’s volume that’s the issue, as the Blazers are giving up nearly three more 3-point shots and two more up-close attempts per night than they did last year.
When you compound that slippage by putting opponents on the free-throw line more often — only Phoenix and Memphis have committed more personal fouls per game than the Blazers, and only the Suns have allowed more free throws per game — while forcing turnovers at the league’s sixth-lowest rate, you’ve got the recipe for some ghastly defensive outings. And man, have the Blazers had those this season.
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Portland has allowed 110 or more points 18 times in 29 games this season, going 4-14 in those games. Raw totals can sometimes obscure the truth of a team’s mettle, since some teams play at faster or slower paces than others, which can inflate or depress score lines … but that’s not the case for the Blazers, who enter Monday’s action allowing an average of 110.4 points per 100 possessions, dead last in the NBA in defensive efficiency. Should they continue conceding at this clip, Stotts’ club would be the first team since the Jay Triano-and-Andrea Bargnani-era Toronto Raptors to finish a season at or above the 110-per-100 mark. (Those Raps did so in both the 2009-10 and 2010-11 seasons.)
No matter how well you produce points — and behind the shot- and playmaking of Lillard and C.J. McCollum, the Blazers boast the NBA’s eighth-most potent offensive attack — if you hemorrhage buckets like Portland has through failures of focus, communication and connectivity, you’ll struggle to stay in the playoff picture, let alone reach the ranks of real contenders. After losing six of seven, the Blazers now sit at 13-16, just one game ahead of the nondescript Nuggets and two up on the ever-dysfunctional Kings in the race for the No. 8 seed in the West. With summertime signing Festus Ezeli reportedly unlikely to get healthy enough to make the defensive impact that general manager Neil Olshey had hoped for, and an upcoming slate that includes meetings with a slew of high-powered offenses — including another visit to Oracle on Jan. 4 — Portland’s situation seems likely to get worse before it gets better, barring a game-changing acquisition.
Even so, Lillard remains optimistic, remembering that before last year’s surprise trip to the conference semifinals, the Blazers had scuffled to an 11-20 start. One great sustained run — like Portland’s 22-8 stretch from Christmas Day 2015 through March 1, 2016 — can change everything. Before the Blazers can catch fire, though, they need a spark; whether Lillard’s ferocious and frank assessment can do the job remains to be seen.
“In the NBA season, you have hard times. Right now we’re just having a hard time,” Lillard said after the game, according to Richman of the Oregonian. “As a team we’ve been in worse positions. We got that fight in us. We gotta have it a lot more consistently.”
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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!
