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ORACLE ARENA, OAKLAND, CA — By the time the dust had settled after the altercation between the Golden State Warriors‘ Andrew Bogut and the Portland Trailblazers‘ Joel Freeland Saturday night at #Roaracle, and Stephen Curry nailed two of the technical fouls that were netted by the Warriors from it, the Blazers found themselves down 71-81. Not only that, Blazers star point guard and Oakland native Damian Lillard, whose first trip back to his hometown last year resulted in a 37-point outburst in a game that the Blazers lost by six, was shooting just 3-for-14, including a blocked layup that Bogut sent into the stands.
But that didn’t phase Lillard. As the third quarter came to a close, Klay Thompson would pickup his fifth foul, sending LaMarcus Aldridge to the line. By then the Warriors still led 83-73, then Lillard made two three-pointers in a row, cutting the lead to 84-81. The Blazers used that momentum to cruise to a resounding victory in the fourth. Final tally for Lillard: 20 points, 9 assists — eerily similar to Curry’s game totals (22 points, 11 assists), as well as season averages.
“I’m gonna stay aggressive. It is what it is. Shots aren’t always gonna fall,” Lillard said after the game, “The most important thing is to try to find ways to affect the game. When my shot wasn’t falling, I was still being aggressive and attacking. The ball wasn’t going in, but I still made plays, still chasing guys off screens. I chased them off screens and they still made shots. We stayed the course and down the stretch some of those shots started to come out.”
And while Oracle will always have a special place in his heart, he’s matured into a consummate professional who will do whatever it takes to get the win, whether it’s in Oakland or not.
“I think he has the same mentality for every game but its always special when you come back home. You know, you have family and friends and grew up coming to games here,” said his point guard teammate 13-year veteran Earl Watson, “He told me about how he was going to the games when the Warriors had Baron Davis running the point, the whole series when they played Dallas. He was at the game. So it’s kinda like it has to be really special to come back and play on that same court.”
“His first time back was special which was last year. The dream of becoming a professional basketball player becomes real and now you’re facing your hometown team, so it probably is a bit different the first time. When you do it a couple times it becomes old hat, but the mentality is still to play well in your hometown,” said Warriors coach Mark Jackson, “What separates the good and the great ones is they wanna do it every single night no matter where they are.”
Lillard has always shown the resiliency and fearlessness that helped the Blazers come back for the win.
One great story comes from Melvin Landry, the founder of his AAU team, the Oakland Rebels. Landry tells the story of how Lillard, the prospect from Weber State, did something that would normally defy logic for an NBA draftee hoping to make an impression on scouts at the two-day NBA Draft Combine.
“From my understanding in talking to agents and talking to NBA players and people, if you did well on the first day, you don’t come back or play the 2nd day,” said Landry, “Damian is a competitor so he didn’t want it to appear that what he did the first day was just a fluke. So he decided to go back the second day just to prove, ‘Hey, what I did the first day wasn’t a fluke.'”
Reports from that Combine were glowing.
“He wanted to be on the floor, dominate the drill, but not only dominate the drill,” said Jay Williams, formerly a star point guard at Duke and currently a college basketball analyst for ESPN and ESPNU. “[He wanted to] look into his opponent’s eyes and [make] them understand that he dominated the drill.”
At the combine, Williams saw Lillard’s moxie, “myopic vision” and a mentality unmatched by his peers.
Here is Chris Gold, Weber State‘s Director of Basketball Operations:
Gold called Lillard the hardest-working player he’d ever seen. “Everything you’d see, late nights in the gym, sometimes getting two workouts in, how hard he’d go in practice. He’d work out in the morning, a full-blown 45-minute workout,” said Gold. “[Assistant coach] Phil [Beckner] was just pushing him, pushing him, pushing him, and [he would] come back an hour or two later where most guys are probably just dead. And he would just practice harder than anybody else for another 2-3 hours … He was so fine-tuned from working on every detail of his game. He didn’t like having any weaknesses, so he’d attack every single thing he possibly could.”
There was even a comparison to Curry:
Both Curry and Lillard are great shooters, but Lillard has more bounce, and he’s physically stronger than Curry. Lillard will face the same questions about competition and his ability to run the point, but this kid is for real.
More on Lillard’s elimination of weaknesses:
“He is obsessive,” Weber State head coach Randy Rahe said. “Every year, he erased a weakness. His catch-and-shoot game. His middle game. The pick-and-roll. He’ll never be good enough in his mind, and that’s going to make some NBA team very, very happy.”
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He was the Big Sky Conference MVP his sophomore season but injured his foot the following season, delaying his rise on the NBA draft board a year.
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Lillard decided to work out for NBA teams this past month on an individual basis, as opposed to the group workouts that many players attend. “I wanted teams to get a better look at me and to see what kind of shape I am in,” he said.
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ESPN’s Chad Ford watched Lillard’s workout with the Warriors and said it was the toughest workout he has seen in 10 years. Reports from Portland were that Lillard missed only two shots the entire workout, and it was the best one there since Kevin Durant’s.
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While some questioned why he worked out alone, Lillard was the best prospect to participate in both days of the NBA combine in Chicago. His jumper kept falling and his rise continued.
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“I wanted to kill all the talk,” Lillard said. “I am not scared of anybody, so I played both days.”
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Lillard says he plays with a chip on his shoulder, but [AAU Oakland Rebels coach] Raymond Young thinks he also plays with his heart on his sleeve.
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“He just loves hoops,” Young said. “He could have nice clothes and dress shoes on, not even be walking by a court but just see one in the distance … and before you know it, he will be on that court running around and shooting.”
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Lillard gives a lot of credit to his dad – “for telling me to stop dunking and work on shooting, because a lot of people can’t shoot” – and Young for the position he is in today.
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“I always pushed myself really hard, but on the days that maybe I didn’t feel like it, he pushed me harder,” Lillard said.
Landry explains how Lillard was growing up in the gym:
As a young kid growing up, Damian always had athletic ability but he had to learn how to hone it, dribbling skills and shooting skills. He was always real fast and could always jump real high. He would always be at the gym, always kept the ball in his hand, always dribbled down the street. His demeanor and determination was a little bit different than other kids and you could kind of see it.
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He wasn’t the best ballhandler or the best shooter. That’s why it was, ‘Listen, if I wanna do this, all kids think they can make it to the NBA, but if this is something I want to do, I have to do it.’ So he really worked on his dribbling and he really worked on his shooting. He was always a hustler, you could always play D if you were a hustler. He’s not the greatest defender but he was always a hustler.
Young concurs:
Young first met Lillard in eighth grade and sized him up the only way he knew how — brutally honest .
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“No, he wasn’t great,” Young recalls. “He could score the ball but he would not play a lick of defense.”
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Young ran child-labor camps, not practices, working his players inside the abandoned gymnasium of an adult school. The central air didn’t work; sometimes neither did the lights.
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Of course, the place lacked proper instructional tools, so Young pulled out bricks from the ground, covered with insects and dirt, and made the boys hold one in each extended hand while stooped low in a defensive stance. If a single arm bent, then everyone had to run. And if another, then the boys slid down court holding sandbags.
“Everybody [on his youth teams] would always be dunking, and he’d be like, ‘Man, why are you doing all that dunking in warmups? You need to be warming up your jumper, shooting off the glass, shooting free throws,’ ” Lillard said. “He was always telling me, ‘You need to shoot. A lot of people can’t shoot.’ ”
“He has an older brother that’s a football player that made him real tough,” Landry said, “but he had a passion for what he does. His father played college ball. It’s in his genes. His brother played college football as well, so I think as a younger brother, you got people in front of you that makes you wanna do great things.”
Again, from Amick:
“The more I started to shoot, to get a lot of reps up, the more I started to make a lot of shots,” Lillard said. “And then I started to hold myself to a standard, like, ‘All right, I’m going to make 10 shots, but I’m only going to give myself 12 shots to make 10. And if I don’t, then I’m going to stand in this spot until I make 10 of 12.’ I think that’s when I started to be a shotmaker.”
He’s also hard on himself:
“I don’t really believe that compliments make you soft,” he said, laughing. “But I think when people constantly give you compliments, they must feel the need to always give you those compliments and shower you with them and make you feel like a confident person. I think people who need to be complimented all the time aren’t really confident. There are a lot of people who need people to say, ‘Oh, you’re so good at this, you did a really good job at this’ — just for them to feel comfortable and confident. I feel like that would not be me.”
Even at the Team USA workouts:
“He felt like he had a good week down there,” Young said, then adding, “If he felt like he had a good week, then it was a very good week. He don’t give himself enough credit sometimes.”
While it’s well-known Lillard wasn’t heavily recruited out of high school, and the Rebels program in Oakland is in the shadows of the more-well-known Oakland Soldiers (Lillard made sure there was a donation made to the Rebels when he signed his deal with Adidas). Landry recalls Lillard’s summer after his junior year.
“Damian had a good Vegas tournament. Coaches were talking, didn’t really know him. He was kind of like the silent sleeper. We went from Vegas to LA (for another tournament). Game Two and Game Three, I mean, coaches were all over the place like, ‘Who is this kid? Where’d this kid come from? How did he slip under the radar?’ and no one knows who he is. That was a great time for him, a great time for other kids in our program. Damian really, really came on in that last run before being recruited by colleges at this point. He really lit Vegas up and lit LA up.”
Weber State was fortunate to land Lillard. He was under-recruited out of Oakland. Rahe said he knew Lillard’s AAU program well, and he was in hot pursuit of the guard during the summer between his junior and senior seasons.
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“I went and watched him that spring, [and] saw that he was really good while he was playing for the Oakland Rebels,” Rahe said. “It wasn’t a big-time AAU program like the Oakland Soldiers. But there were others who saw it too, like San Diego State, Washington State, SMU, Saint Mary’s and some Pac-10 schools. But none were that serious.
Lillard’s roots in Oakland run deep and he respects those who came before him. Per SLAM Magazine:
I plan to carry on the tradition of Jason Kidd, Gary Payton and Brian Shaw. They all came out of Oakland, so I feel like there is a level that I need to live up to, being from Oakland, and I know they expect the same thing of me.
Not surprisingly, he’s been a Warriors fan for life (well, at least until he became a Blazer):
He hopes that they will get to see him play regularly in the NBA. Though many experts have him going to the Trail Blazers at No. 6, Lillard would love to get picked by the Warriors at No. 7. He knows they have Stephen Curry, but Lillard could play major minutes at both guard spots for his hometown team.
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“It would be great,” Lillard said. “I grew up here, all of my family is here, it’s home. I grew up a Warriors fan. I am still a Warriors fan, unless I go somewhere else – that will be the first time I won’t be a Warriors fan.”
And one of the reasons he picked the number zero as is number was representative of the “O” in Oakland:
Next season I'll be wearing #0 . . . Grew up in Oakland, college in Ogden, and my NBA team is in Oregon
— Damian Lillard (@Dame_Lillard) July 5, 2012
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With a tattoo on his chest that connects the famous oak tree logo of Oakland to his heart (originally designed by native retailer Oaklandish and even used by the City of Oakland until recently), he’s as “Oaklandish” as there is:
Lillard will be back in Oakland when the Blazers face the Warriors again on January 26, 2014. Maybe the Warriors can erect a statue of him outside Oracle by then.
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