Damian Lillard's 'Basketball Decision' to Come Home

📍PORTLAND, Ore. — Among the many things Damian Lillard said on Monday evening, sitting between Trail Blazers general manager Joe Cronin and head coach Chauncey Billups in a private room on the club level at the Moda Center, one jumped out.

"When we all sat down and this idea started to move towards me signing back here, I'm going to look at the basketball situation," he said in response to a question about the team he's walking into, two years after an acrimonious exit. "We play basketball and you want to win basketball games. A lot of people may look at it as a family decision, and obviously anybody would have their family be a part of a decision that they make. But this was just as much a basketball decision."

Lillard's return to Portland, and to the Blazers, is a great story for many reasons. It's great for Lillard, personally, that he won't have to be away from his three young kids nearly as much while he recovers from his torn Achilles and plays out the final stage of his career. It's great for the organization, as a franchise sale looms, that their all-time leading scorer is now all but certain to retire in a Blazers uniform. It's great for the fanbase that they'll get the closure they never got with Bill Walton, Clyde Drexler or LaMarcus Aldridge when they left.

But since news broke last Thursday that Lillard had agreed to a three-year, $42 million deal to return to Portland, I've been wondering how the basketball part of it will go.

More than that, I've been wondering how Lillard thinks the basketball part of it will go, both in this upcoming rehab year and after that, when he's actually playing.

"I've watched the team, even at a distance, and I've followed and stayed in touch with what was going on," he said. "Looking at how the league is trending and how it's changing, it's not the same old thing no more. Young teams that guard and have depth and compete and are connected, this team has all of those things. It's all there, from the talent to the depth to having it on both sides of the ball, it's all there."

I'm not the first person to make this observation, but the team the Blazers have built since Lillard's departure is exactly the kind of team he always wished they had built for him in his prime.

Imagine if, instead of Maurice Harkless and Al-Farouq Aminu, those teams had Deni Avdija and Toumani Camara on the wings. Imagine if, instead of piecing together a center rotation after Jusuf Nurkic's leg injury with the likes of Enes Kanter, Meyers Leonard, Zach Collins and Hassan Whiteside, they had a 21-year-old elite rim protector like Donovan Clingan. Imagine Yang Hansen as a supercharged version of a playmaking big like Mason Plumlee.

Lillard admitted on Monday that he was also imagining it when he watched Blazers games on League Pass during his two years as a member of the Bucks.

"I watch the Trail Blazers specifically, and I'm always looking like, 'How do I fit in?,'" he said. "That's my natural way of thinking, because to me, this is who I've always seen myself with. So I watched with that type of mentality, even if it was to never happen. And I saw how they competed, I saw how they cheered for each other on the bench, regardless of who was finishing the game. How they shared the ball. One game I might see [Shaedon Sharpe] go crazy, and then it might be [Anfernee Simons] against us, and then Deni might have a five-game stretch where he's killing. And I'm just looking at it like, 'This is one of those teams that's coming.'"

The question of where Lillard fits into the on-court equation is one that will have to wait a while. Neither he nor Cronin said it outright, but all indications are that Lillard isn't going to play at all in the 2025-26 season. He's the same age Kobe Bryant was when he suffered the Achilles tear that effectively ended his career as a high-level star in 2013. Bryant tried to come back eight months after the injury; it didn't go well. Cronin said the plan is to "do what's best for Dame," and Billups joked that for this season, he'll be "the highest-paid assistant coach in league history."

What happens beyond that will depend on how this season goes. Lillard said he's going to come back as himself, and I believe him that he believes that. He said the prognosis he's gotten from his surgeon and physical therapists is positive, and he's leaned on Aaron Rodgers, Kevin Durant and Rudy Gay for advice on navigating the Achilles recovery process.

Still, he's a full five years older than Durant was when he suffered the injury in 2019. The track record for small guards Lillard's age coming back from this injury is not a strong one. Medical science has evolved greatly even in the 12 years since Kobe's injury, but anyone penciling Lillard in to return to being the perennial All-NBA-caliber superstar he was before the Achilles tear is getting a little ahead of themselves.

If Sharpe and Scoot Henderson continue to improve the way they did the second half of last season, will a post-injury version of Lillard be guaranteed a starting spot? What if Jrue Holiday, who's the same age as Lillard but isn't coming off one of the worst injuries a basketball player can have, is still around?

Even if he does come back close to what he was before, his career will be winding down just as Sharpe, Avdija, Camara and Henderson are entering their primes.

From the day Lillard was drafted in 2012 to the day he requested a trade in 2023, every part of the Trail Blazers organization was built around, and catered towards, him.

That isn't the case anymore. As much as Lillard will immediately retake his spot as the cultural centerpiece of the team, the roster is no longer built specifically with him in mind. He's coming back to be a part of it, not the focus of it.

Is he ready for that?

It sure sounds like it.

"One thing that I've missed over the last two years playing on an older team is, I'm able to be more and give more when I have something to pour into," he said. "When I'm invested in others' careers more. Having the opportunity to do that, especially having a young, rising point guard like Scoot that I'm gonna be playing with now, and Toumani and Deni and Shaedon, who I was with his rookie year. Being around those guys and having so much to share and being able to pour into them and be a part of their continued progress is something that elevates me as a player and as a teammate and as a leader. I'm looking forward to that as well, even when I'm playing."

As unfortunate as the Achilles injury was, it may have created the perfect environment for both sides to ease back into the partnership. If this wasn't widely understood to be a redshirt year, Lillard coming back into the fold would have raised all sorts of questions about Henderson's future and the franchise's belief in him.

Instead, Lillard's impact for the first year will be felt behind the scenes, with no division of minutes and roles to worry about in the short term.

After that?

"I think I'm going to return to form," Lillard said. "That's just my true belief."