The one thing I hope Dame learns from this

Trust your teammates. You don't have to do it all.

This is Dame's first year as The Man. This is his first year in the playoffs without LMA or Wes or Nic. All year I have seen him try to shoulder all the responsibility and the pressure. I think this is a common mistake for a young guy who wants to win. He thinks he has to take over at the end. He wants the ball when the game is on the line, and that's totally commendable, but sometimes being the best player means you give the ball up to someone who has a better shot. Or maybe they're in a rhythm and you're not. Michael Jordan gave the ball up to Steve Kerr for the game winner. You don't always have to take the last shot.

I'm fine with Dame taking tough shots. I'm fine with him trying to make something happen when the rest of the team is flat or ice cold, but tonight I watched Dame try to make something happen while CJ was red hot. This was not the night to try to force Lillard Time. He was not having a good shooting night, and that's fine. It happens. I'm hoping he learns that in a situation like this, keep getting CJ the ball. Get the ball to Crabbe, who was having a great game. Get the ball to Aminu. Your guys were hitting, put some trust in them.

I think this will be a learning experience for him. The guy wants to win so badly, and he wants to lead, but tonight was the night to empower others. It was a great run, and Dame is a special player. I know as he matures and grows, he will only get better. I just hope he starts to trust his teammates to take big shots, because it can't always be him.

 

But whenever he tried trusting his teammates they didn't come through at the end of games.. I don't reallt think he has to learn this, the teammates just need to step up better.

 

Once again the role players killed in back to back games. Aminu was big, Harkless was big, Crabbe was of course HUGE, and Cj was cooking all game. Especially that 4th quarter. Why Stotts drew that dumb iso play for Lillard late in the game is beyond me when Cj was the one killing.

Lillard again came up short. I'm sorry but he was underwhelming in these playoffs. He had a chance in that 4th Q to take over and steal that win. He was missing everything. 16-54 the last 2 games. He needs to really come back next season and work on his efficiency

I can't wait for free agency now

 

I've never really ever read your posts Tunchi. I see people complain about you on here non stop.


I'll say one thing and then go back to ignoring your horseshit posts...... Dame is a Top 10 player in this league. It doesn't matter how much shade you throw his way son, HE IS ONE OF THE TEN BEST PLAYERS ON THE FUCKING PLANET!

 

DROP THE MIC! DROP THE MIC! DROP THE MIC!

 

Great leader. Tremendous human being but pure basketball wise I like Cj better. Lillard killed us these last two games.

Aminu, Crabbe, Harkless, Cj all killed tonight. Lillard couldn't do his part

 

TOP 10 PLAYER ON THE PLANET!
There are only arguably 8 or 9 players in the fucking solar system that rotates around the sun.....that are better than Damian Lillard.

What aren't you grasping? Do you have hooks for hands?

 

I'm just saying he needs to work on his efficiency. Until then let Cj shoot more

 

Do you not understand if it weren't for Dame...... There would be no "last two games" bro. You realize this right? And that this whole run of verbal diarrhea you've been spewing on here the last 6 months makes no sense at all. You comprehend this right?
Like I said earlier, up until now, you haven't evened registered with me. Like a piece of old stale gum that has slowly turned black and sunk into a crack in the sidewalk....but you don't have the common decency of a somewhat normal human being to at least acknowledge his strengths.
This makes you insignificant in the day to day operations of this site.
Go away now, your game has grown tired.

 

#they

 

the reason I haven't even been on the game forums past few games is because of all the negative bullshit man. It's ridiculous. All the dame hate I can't stand and tunchi is one of those guys that just contributes nothing to this forum and just pisses everybody off. Not talking about this post because it's a good one but tunchi is here yet again to hijack a quality post

 

I like how you cover your bases, because you've got to assume there are some ballers on the planet Curry came from. He was probably the Adam Morrison of that league, so he decided to come here and dominate the NBA...

 

Tunchi's posts remind me of the posts on a college team's forum I'm on.
One of our rivals made an account and has been masquerading as a fan for over 4 years there.
Always subtly (and not so subtly) tearing the team apart with backhanded compliments etc.
At this point everyone on the board knows he's a fan of the rival team and has called him out but he persists.
It's kind of funny once you realize what's happening.

So who does Tunchi really pull for?
Any guesses?

 

I'm guessing it's the Blazers.

 

Let's not tear people apart for daring to criticize a player on the team, even Lillard. That's a little cultish.

Regarding Lillard's efficiency, it did drop quite a bit in the playoffs. One thing you have to realize about Lillard is that, like Curry, his field goal percentage is not going to be as high as it could be because he fires up so many three-pointers which are, of course, lower percentage shots. But they're worth more points. So it's better to use a metric like TS%, which essentially measures points per shot (divided by 2, giving it a more FG%-similar look)...this takes into account the higher value of three-pointers and free throws, which field goal percentage doesn't capture.

In the regular season, Lillard's TS% was .560 (which is around where it was the past two years) and that's a good mark, especially for a volume scorer. I won't bother comparing to Curry, since Curry is an alien, but for example LaMarcus Aldridge just had arguably his best and most efficient season, and he had a .565 TS% on 5 fewer shots. Lillard has never been an efficiency monster, but he scores at a good efficiency while being the #1 option, which is extremely valuable.

In the playoffs, though, his TS% tumbled to .527 which isn't horrible, but it's pretty mediocre. This isn't an isolated occurrence, as last year he had a genuinely awful .491 TS% and that was with Aldridge. On the other hand, two years ago, he had a tremendous .578 TS%. Last year's mark could be the result of a small sample size, just a few bad games at the wrong time. His great mark two years ago and his mediocre mark this year were in bigger 11-game samples. While it's true that Lillard faced two good defenses this year, it's fair to knock him (insofar as it's ever fair to knock your best player) for not quite performing up to par. He was carrying a significant burden, but it's not like this is a one-man team...it wouldn't have gotten this far, even with the Clippers' and Warriors' injuries, as a one-man team.

My hope is that Lillard also sees his playoffs as subpar for a player of his caliber and studies film to figure out what he might have done better. I think he probably did force a few more shots that he should have, trying to "will" his team to victory, which is not usually a good idea. You have to trust the offense, and the Blazers do have a good one.

On the other, other hand, Lillard had a 110 offensive rating, so clearly he was still a major net positive on that end. He's a really good player, that should never get lost. But it's okay to criticize him, like any other player--he's not perfect.

 

Tunchi didn't say that Damian sucks. But I think he made a valid point about his efficiency. Damian shot under 35% from 2pt range over the playoffs. The team overall shoots 50% from 2pt range. If the problem is guys defending Dame so hard, maybe he needs to get the ball to is team mates, and let the offense generate it's 50% efficieny. If that happened, the team would average 4 more points per game, which would have been huge.

There are games when the supporting cast looks so bad that I just want Dame to jack up shots, but the last two games in particular, they were on, and Damian missed so many shots. Perhaps if he had given it up more we'd have won. To come back and say "Damian is our best player yadda yadda yadda" misses the point.

 

To Minstrel's post about Damian's TS%. What brought it down was his 2pt FG% He actually shot better from the FT and 3pt line than he did in the regular season. And he really only had 1 game (game 2 against LA) where he really stunk it up from 3pt range (0-6).

But on the other hand, he had several stinkers from 2pt range in the playoffs. I think we all remember him putting up some wild shots.

This is what he shot in the GS Series from 2
Game 1 4-18 22%
Game 2 2-9 22%
Game 3 6-14 43%
Game 4 4-12 33%
Game 5 5-16 31%

I think you see the pattern here. Game 3 was our only win. Notice that if we would have gotten 50% of those shots in games 4 and 5, that would have equated to 4 and 6 more points respectively. Enough to change the outcome of the game, and it's not asking for much.

 

You can say that his shooting was underwhelming, and it would be hard to argue with you, but to say flatly that Dame was underwhelming is ridiculous. Let's take a look at the last five games:

Game 1 - 30 points, 5 assists, 4 steals
Game 2 - 25 points, 6 assists, 4 rebounds, 2 steals
Game 3 - 40 points, 10 asssits, 5 rebounds
Game 4 - 36 points, 10 assists, 6 rebounds, 1 block
Game 5 - 28 points, 7 assists, 7 rebounds, 2 steals

I mean.... underwhelming? Really?

In the last two games, Dame shot 13-16 from the free throw line in game 4 and 12-12 from the free throw line in game 5. The dude was attacking. He was getting to the line. His shot was off, but he was contributing. I just want him to realize that it's not always on him. He has other guys who can score. CJ was really the main reason why we were still in the game. He was going off. Get him the ball.

Part of the blame is on Terry. I don't think Lillard is the type of guy to tell his coach to shove it, so Terry needs to reign him in a little bit and encourage him to pass. Dame is still a young guy. He has a green light, but sometimes that means realizing that your shot isn't falling and there are other guys around you who can hit the shot. This just circles back around to my main point..... trust.

 

Lillard, as I mentioned, had a 110 offensive rating despite his so-so efficiency. The reason for that is his "gravity," the pull he exerts on the defense, warping them towards him because he's such a dangerous shooter. That gravity is a big reason for why the Portland offense works, why players like Aminu, Crabbe and even McCollum look good. If you're going to ding Lillard for his efficiency, you also have to credit him with some of the success of his teammates, which has a visible component in his assists, but also has a statistically (outside of indirect measures like +/-) invisible effect of creating openings in the defense as defenders scramble to prevent him from having even the slightest opening to shoot.

Lillard wasn't the problem. He wasn't a problem. He was still the Blazers' best offensive player, even in the playoffs, and the single biggest reason that they challenged the Warriors. He can improve, leverage his gravity better instead of firing up some of the more ill-advised shots but let's also remember...some of those ill-advised shots go down and contribute to opposing defenses' fear of him, warping the defense further. He may not like being compared to Curry, but he has a mini-Curry effect on defenses due to being perhaps the second-best tough-shot-maker after Curry.

 

I really think we missed the pick and pop in our arsenal. That was such a huge staple for us over the past few years.