'A Piece of Art'
Damian Lillard scored a career-high 71 points in a win over Houston.
PORTLAND, Ore. — It varies how early on you can sense one of those Damian Lillard nights coming.
Sometimes it's right away, and sometimes you don't realize he has 40-plus until it happens. Even his 60-point game against the Jazz last month didn't feel like a 60-point game because everything happened so in the flow.
Sunday night was different, and Lillard knew it before the game even tipped off. He was standing by the scorer's table with Trail Blazers general manager Joe Cronin, getting ready to be honored in front of the home crowd for winning the 3-Point Contest at All-Star Weekend in Salt Lake City last Saturday. Cronin remarked to Lillard about how amped-up the crowd seemed for a Sunday night game against a Rockets team with the worst record in the NBA.
"I turned to him and said, 'It's because they're expecting a run,' Lillard recalled. "They're excited for something.'"
Not many people could have predicted "something" would be how the rest of the night unfolded. Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups called it "a piece of art."
71 isn't just Lillard's career high, blowing past his previous best of 61. It's tied with Donovan Mitchell for the most points in a game this season, and Mitchell needed two overtimes to do it. It puts him on a list of just eight players in NBA history to break 70, a group that does not include Michael Jordan or LeBron James.
It's the kind of performance you joke about being drug-tested after, but that actually happened to Lillard. When he walked into the locker room from the training room after the game, he had a blue Band-Aid on one of his forearms because the NBA had drawn a blood sample. You can't make it up.
Only Lillard and Cronin were privy to their pregame conversation and his prediction. For the rest of us, the realization came with about two and a half minutes left in the first half. Lillard hit a pair of free throws to get to 30 points—routine stuff for him these days. Then, he hit three consecutive threes, capped off by one from a step inside halfcourt. For good measure, he added a runner in the closing seconds of the half to bring his total past the 40-point mark.
From then on, it was one of those nights when the crowd was ready and eager to explode with every made basket. That also meant the groans of disappointment on his rare misses, and the air coming out of the Moda Center whenever he passed the ball to a teammate. Once you get into these kinds of numbers, making the right basketball play isn't what the crowd is there to see.
The scoring barrage didn't pick back up until well into the third quarter. The Rockets started throwing junk defenses at Lillard to take him out of his rhythm. He responded by getting open looks for teammates until Houston, for some reason, went back to single coverage, at which point he went back to work.
"When you show a team, 'I'll give it up,' I think they saw how clean the looks were that we were getting during that time," Lillard said. "Like, 'We're not going to get back in the game playing this way, either.' I was patient with that. I wasn't like, 'I'm gonna get 70 tonight.' I was playing to keep the lead, I wasn't trying to score a bunch of points. They went back to their normal coverages. Typically, I would be like, 'Let's keep going.' But when they went back, I got aggressive again."
Lillard ended the third quarter with 50 points, the second time in his career he's had 50 with 12 minutes left to play. The Rockets hung around and kept it just close enough to force him back into the game early into the fourth quarter. At previous points this season, Lillard has been resistant to chasing records and career highs. He didn't want to come back into a blowout win against Minnesota in December to chase a career high in made three-pointers in a game after he tied his previous mark of 11. (That one fell on Sunday too, by the way.) He didn't want to come back in against the Jazz one point shy of his career high. He didn't want to press to pass Clyde Drexler as the franchise's all-time leading scorer.
And when he did break the 70-point seal on Sunday, he didn't really want the trappings that came with it. He took the Wilt Chamberlain photo at his locker only because the Blazers' longtime former PR director, Jim Taylor, used to make him do that when he set a new career high. He's talked before about not enjoying the fanfare that comes with these sorts of career-defining accomplishments, as proud as he is of the feats themselves.
"I enjoy it when I'm in the game and going after people," Lillard said Sunday. "I enjoy those moments when you're hot and you're in attack mode and you're feeling good. But it's the moments afterwards that I struggle with. When I walked off the court, I was like, 'Am I supposed to be overly excited, or what?' Those are the moments that I struggle with."
And the Blazers may need more of this from Lillard to stay above water. After his career night in a win over the Rockets, Portland is still two games under .500 and half a game out of the 10th and final spot in the play-in tournament, with a tough six-game road trip coming up. Getting healthy would help. There are no official timelines on the returns of Anfernee Simons, Jusuf Nurkic or Justise Winslow, but they're believed to be close. Simons, whose ankle sprain look particularly gruesome in the moment in the Blazers' final game before the All-Star break, is already shooting and doing on-court drills without tape on his ankle. Nurkic has also started doing on-court work.
In recent days, Lillard has been steadfast in his belief that the Blazers still have enough juice to salvage a playoff run out of what's been an up-and-down season. He believes he's playing at the highest level of his career, and the numbers make it hard to argue with that. Over the final six weeks of the season, we will see if that's enough.
"We've got to be unbreakable," he said. "That doesn't mean it's always gonna go right, or it's always gonna be fun. Whatever happens, we've just got to keep marching forward. We're gonna be in some dogfights. We're gonna be in some tough games. We can't look at a game like tonight and be like, 'We're playing Houston, we're supposed to win.' No. Our back is against the wall every night, no matter if it's a team we should beat, a team people think we can't beat, it has to be like, 'Nobody's going to beat us before we get in the run.' The energy and the way we go about it has to be militant. No matter who it's against or what's supposed to happen, we've got to win games. And we're not going to go undefeated, but we've got to go out there and give ourselves a chance every night."