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With the Bucks, Damian Lillard is no longer an overachiever. He's just meeting his own expectations.
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- With the Bucks, Damian Lillard is no longer an overachiever. He's just meeting his own expectations.
Sitting on a stage in a Milwaukee Bucks jersey for the first time Oct. 2, Damian Lillard spoke for more than 20 minutes mostly about moving on from Portland, his defense and playing with Giannis Antetokounmpo. He fielded one question about how he would approach handling a championship expectation, and in that answer he noted this would be the first time in his life he was not considered an underdog.
"I've done a lot more overachieving in my career than like living up to what was expected," he said.
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It was an interesting thought.
For all that was new about being traded for the first time – and would be new about his 12thseason and first in Milwaukee – Lillard came in fully aware this would be different from anything he ever experienced. He knew what he didn't know.
Which is saying something, because before becoming the No. 5 all-time three-point shooter Dec. 13 and before scoring his 20,000th career point Tuesday night against San Antonio, Lillard sat on that stage in October already rubber stamped for the Hall of Fame. But he'd never been to an NBA Finals. He'd been in one conference finals.
Antetokounmpo may have texted him that they were going to go get a championship, but the reality of it is Lillard never had to perform under the weight that his team should win one.
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He knows his résumé. He talked about being overlooked in high school. Going to Weber State. Winning rookie of the year. Making his first all-star and all-NBA teams. Leading the Portland Trail Blazers to the playoffs for eight straight years.
"None of it was expected. I just kept overachieving," he told the Journal Sentinel. "Just putting it all out there and it was always unexpected."
But there's a caveat there.
"Internally, it's not for me personally," he said of that perception. "I mean that in the sense of the outside. How people have always perceived me, as an overachiever. I would have never overachieved if I thought what they thought, you know what I mean?"
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Which is why even though Lillard knew this season would be different for him in so many ways – perhaps even uncomfortable – the expectation of it wouldn't feel that way because it finally matched his own.
"They recognize the situation that I'm in – I'm playing on a really good team with a great player," he said of the external viewpoint of him and the Bucks. "So, I think that's the difference. People are seeing it like OK, the player we expect him as is now paired with another great player on a great team, so I think that's what it is.
"My mentality is the same."
Damian Lillard became the 51st player to score 20,000 points as the Bucks beat the Spurs on Tuesday night.
Damian Lillard continues to dominate with the Bucks, but differently
In the first quarter against the Spurs, Lillard knocked down a three-pointer, a midrange jumper and a driving layup to pass the 20,000-point mark for his career. He is one of just 51 players to reach the milestone, and he is the 17thfastest to the total in reaching it in his 794thgame. To put that into context, 4,778 people had logged at least one NBA game.
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Lillard is an all-time great scorer. A legend who helped redefine the game in the 21stcentury with his three-point shot. But his game is so much more than that.
"The art that he has of scoring and the way that he is tactical about it, the way that he thinks about it and the way that he's able to do it in so many different ways – I think that's what people don't understand how difficult that is," Pat Connaughton told the Journal Sentinel. "And how difficult it is to do consistently."
Lillard is averaging 8.5 free throws per game this season, but he's shot at least 10 on 11 occasions already. Last year, he averaged a career-high 9.6 free throws per game. It's like he spent a decade stretching defenses so thin that now he's quickly puncturing them with left-hand blow-bys and reverse layups.
He is a boxing aficionado, so perhaps it's no coincidence Lillard is working defenses – and the Bucks offense for that matter – like a fighter setting up his strongest punches.
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"I've seen him just continue to add things to his game," said Atlanta head coach Quin Snyder, who game-planned against Lillard as Utah's head coach for eight years.
"There was always something. Some of the stuff he did I'd try to teach guys. We had a move named after him (in Utah). I think that's true of great players for us as coaches. Players show you a lot. And sometimes they're not aware maybe that they're even doing something. In his case, you can tell it's deliberate. He's examining his game and adding things to it all the time."
In Milwaukee, Lillard admitted that with Antetokounmpo, Khris Middleton and Brook Lopez he no longer has to feel like forcing the issue on offense. If his shot isn't there, or teams focus on him with multiple defenders, the right basketball play takes the ball out of his hands to other high-level scorers. Lillard has had at least nine assists on eight occasions and has five points-assists double-doubles.
There are different shot types available to him, too. He's off the ball more, setting up for catch-and-shoot opportunities because, unbelievably, he's been left open as teams have collapsed on Antetokounmpo.
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It was part of his offensive game he said he had been waiting to showcase.
"I've seen it with a lot of players that go to a new team and then there's things that they do that they're showing that you probably didn't see before based on the personnel of the team, they did other things," Lillard told the Journal Sentinel. "It's just to stretch myself to do other things to still help instead of doing the things I've always done. I'll still do those things, because I'll do what makes me, me. But it's an opportunity to stretch myself."
His former coach in Portland recognized it, also.
"We needed him to be special, special, special every night for us to have a chance," Chauncey Billups said. "He doesn't have to be that over there. He can kind of fall back and play-make a lot more than he had the ability to do here. I've seen that as I've watched them. He can be so much more patient in picking his spots now. Teams have been blitzing him and trapping him. Here, when they trapped him we needed him to try to get out of that trap some and still go make a play. Now, when they trap him he can just kind of bait the trap, get in the pocket to Giannis and just watch the team fly."
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That has allowed "Dame Time" to extend beyond just the final seconds so far this season.
Milwaukee is 11-3 in the 14 clutch games in which Lillard has appeared, and he entered Tuesday's game tied with Steph Curry for the most clutch points (78) in the NBA this season. He was 34-for-36 from the free throw line in those moments and has handed out 12 assists in those moments also.
"They still need him to be him," said LaMarcus Aldridge, also a 20,000-point scorer who played three seasons with Lillard in Portland. "They need somebody that's going to make clutch shots at the end of the game, they need somebody that's going to have ice in their veins. That's him. He's great at pick-and-roll, and that's what we got great at. I think he's great at playing off the post. Giannis posts up a lot, that's what I did a lot, (and) he's great at reading off the post, getting his shot. He can play so many different roles – catch-and-shoot, off the dribble, pick-and-roll. I think he's so versatile that it's going to work out."
Milwaukee Bucks forward Giannis Antetokounmpo (34) and guard Damian Lillard (0) talk during the first half of their game against the Detroit Pistons on Dec. 16, 2023, at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee.
Damian Lillard and the Bucks manage championship expectation
The thing about a championship expectation is that it can't be met until sometime in June. But, it places the day-to-day and the game-by-game results under a different microscope.
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Even if the Bucks, in terms of how good they are, have met Lillard's own expectation, the way they all are viewed on a regular basis is perhaps the biggest difference he's experienced in managing it all.
"We saw it where it was like, oh, they gonna win a championship – we all knew it was going to be a process," he told the Journal Sentinel. "We're not going to win a championship in October or November or December, none of that. Then we start the season, we have a slow start. Now everybody's like oh, they're not that good, they're struggling, oh, what's going on? Then we slowly start to figure it out.
"Which is why you can't get too caught up in the way of the season, because there's going to be adversity, there's going to be ups and downs. We've seen both sides already."
It doesn't mean it's been easy. Everyone wasn't thrilled with early-season blowout losses to Atlanta and Toronto. Lillard went to head coach Adrian Griffin and asked to return to his Portland rotation of playing entire first quarters. There were 20-point deficits to Boston and Portland. There was a strategic decision late in Chicago that arguably led to an overtime loss. There was a miscommunication – or lack of communication altogether – late-game against Indiana in the In-Season Tournament semifinal.
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But there have also been 2 five-game win streaks and 14 straight wins at home. There have been historic – individual, franchise and league – performances, too.
"I think we've seen both sides where they thought highly of us and then they was down on us and now we're right back here in position to (win)," Lillard said. "But we're still a work in progress. That doesn't change. I think for us we just gotta know that it's a marathon and you just want to make sure you're playing the right kind of ball and that you reach that point you want to reach when it's the right time. That's why we get 82 games to figure it out and put it all together. You just want to win in the process and we've managed to do that."
Part of that winning has been Lillard's ability to continue to be dominant scorer, but in a different way. He's averaging his fewest points per game and taking his fewest threes per game (in a healthy season) since 2018-19. He's taken his fewest shots per game since 2014-15.
"He's got the right mentality and personality and humility that he has allows him to take a step back and try to fit in as opposed to try to come and say no, y'all playing with me," Billups said. "He's not that type of person."
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Former Portland assistant John McCullough agreed.
"I'm not sure he's out to get his, but he just gets his in the rhythm of everybody else," said McCullough, now the director of player development for the University of Tulsa women's basketball team.
"That is the great character of Dame. He wants to win. If it takes dropping 40, he's going to do it. If it takes helping somebody else do it, that's what is going to happen that night. I mean, he can get points if he wants to get points but he wants to win games. He wants to win a championship."
Which circles back, of course, to the expectation of all of this and why Lillard has played seemingly free of all it.
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"Because I've always had high expectations of myself," he told the Journal Sentinel matter-of-factly. "The reason why I've always been able to overachieve is because I never – when we weren't expected to do anything, I never cared or shared that belief. And when we were expected to do something I already thought that anyways. It didn't carry my belief.
"So when I came here I had the same high expectations of myself and the team, so it didn't change my feelings or how I was able to operate."
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Bucks' Damian Lillard not overachieving, just meeting his expectations
