Three years and two days ago, the Portland Trail Blazers found themselves in a very similar situation to start their season, getting off to a 7-6 start after a loss to the Houston Rockets. Damian Lillard delivered a nugget of impatience, saying his Blazers “suck” after the Rockets handed them a 17-point loss.
Fast-forward three years and Lillard has no regrets about what he said, but he feels different this time, even if Portland's record through 14 games is much more dire than it was back then:
“If I felt that way again, I would say it again,” Lillard told Jason Quick of The Athletic after revisiting memory lane. “But at that time, it was different than it is now. Like right now, we are competing on defense, making the team miss, but we can’t get the ball. So right now, I’m more like ‘Come on, man. We’ve got to figure this out.'”
Lillard still recalls being confronted by his coach Terry Stotts back then:
“Dame, you think we suck? … I don’t think we suck,” said Stotts then.
“I knew what I was saying then. It was the truth. We sucked and I said we sucked,” said Lillard. “Why… you think I should say it now?”
Quick is a longtime beat writer and his memory is as good as any. This isn't the first time the Blazers have gotten off to a less-than-desirable start, but Lillard knows how to handle them much better now:
“I’m just older,” Lillard said. “It’s not impossible for me to think we suck, but I just better see what can be now. Even then I felt like we were going to be fine … and now, I feel like we are going to be cool. I mean, it’s such a long season. And we’ve won 13 games in a row before. And, things can’t go much worse. They just can’t go much worse.”
The Blazers will be getting some help from new signing Carmelo Anthony on Tuesday, but they're still ways away from fixing mistakes at the defensive end and implementing more effort, which has cost them plenty of games already during a 5-9 start to the 2019-20 campaign.
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