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📍TUALATIN, Ore. — In one week, the Trail Blazers will play their first preseason game and the world will get its first look at the Damian Lillard-Ja Morant pairing that has been the cause of so much intrigue and speculation since the summer.
Two point guards, both ball-dominant and high-usage in their best years, neither with great defensive reputations. How’s it all going to work?
So far, so good.
“It’s fun,” Morant said after Wednesday’s practice, the second of training camp. “There’s so much space with Dame out there. Y’all know what type of shooter he is. But it also creates for everybody else. A drive-and-kick, guys gotta go out there and close out. So we’ve both taken an unselfish route to learn each other’s games, but we’ve still got to be us. That’s what it takes. We’ve just got to be super intentional when we have the ball, and then understanding the other guy that’s off.”
Head coach Micah Nori hasn’t named the opening-night starters yet, but Lillard said Tuesday that he expects himself and Morant to be in that group together, along with Deni Avdija.
That’s a lot of ballhandlers who have all had their best years with an offense run through them, so it’s going to be an adjustment for all three to fit their games around each other.
Lillard is ready to make it work however he needs to.
“I really want to see [Morant] do well, same with Deni,” Lillard said. “So I’m just operating from that place. Whether that's me sacrificing, or it's, like, we come in, they know I play with the ball. They've had the ball. I'm a shot-maker, so it's more opportunity for me to say, ‘OK, I'll be off the ball, then you handle, because I know that I'm a threat off the ball as a shooter.’ I'm gonna give them space.”
Morant says he likes playing off the ball, something he wasn’t able to do much in Memphis. He also believes that the poor three-point shooting numbers he’s put up since he got to the NBA (31.1 percent on his career, and never higher than 34 percent in a season) are a result of having to create most of those looks for himself off the dribble.
Playing with Lillard and playing off the ball could open up catch-and-shoot looks, which he feels more comfortable shooting. It’s a part of his game he wants to “unlock” this year. If he can, that will make a lot of the fit questions go away.
“The one thing with this group that we have to find out is, a lot of the guys are coming back, and we’re adding Dame, and then you're adding [Ja], which are two needle movers,” Nori said Tuesday. “And so how can we integrate them into our top nine and get those guys playing together? It’s all about combinations.”
Nori has been deliberate through the first two days of training camp about having the nine likely regular rotation players play together during scrimmages. It’s been a feeling-out process with some growing pains that will be sorted out as camp progresses.
But the chemistry between Lillard and Morant is one thing that hasn’t needed any work.
“I feel like we’re good,” Morant said. “The only thing now is jelling everybody together. Me and Dame hasn’t been a problem. We look smooth out there. But it’s jelling everybody else together. Me and him coming to the team this year, and the rest of these guys have already been playing. So they might not take a shot that they would have taken last year, because me and Dame are on the floor, and that’s not what we want. We need those guys to continue to be aggressive.”
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