'Dame Time' Makes a Grand Re-Entrance

📍LOS ANGELES — Anyone who’s watched the Trail Blazers over the last few years has lost count of how many times they’ve lost this exact game.

You don’t give up a combined 67 points to Luka Dončić and Austin Reaves, miss 15 free throws and win.

You don’t have a game where Deni Avdija picks up four fouls before halftime, Donovan Clingan loses Sandro Mamukaleshvili in the paint multiple times and Scoot Henderson has five very loud turnovers at key points in the game, and win.

This is a game, if you’re a team like this, that you’re happy you kept the score respectable despite a sloppy performance and didn’t get blown out by the Lakers on national TV.

That’s how it would have gone last year. But last year, the Blazers didn’t have Damian Lillard in uniform.

The opening-night blowout win over Phoenix had all the fanfare and trappings of a moment as monumental as Lillard’s first game in a Blazers uniform in three years, but it was over in the opening minutes. There was no opportunity for the real Dame Time—the clutch shots and wrist taps and improbable wins—to show itself because that game was never in doubt.

In that way, Tuesday night was the real return of Dame Time, in a new and possibly improved incarnation.