The Damian Lillard trade saga has dominated Portland Trail Blazers headlines since they were eliminated from the postseason a few months ago. There has been plenty of speculation that Lillard would demand a trade after another first-round exit, but that hasn't come 
 yet.

Lillard did want to see how free agency went, but so far it has been rather quiet. Outside of throwing a bag at Norman Powell to get him to re-sign, the Blazers haven't done anything all that notable.

How does Dame feel about that? Let him tell you in his own words from Tokyo.

Via Chris Sheridan of BasketballNews.com:

“Honestly I haven’t really dove too deep into it. I’ve really been focusing on here,” Lillard said Friday on a USA Basketball conference call.

“There are a lot of things that are out of my control. When you go into free agency and things like this, you never know what’s going to happen. You never know where guys are going to end up and why they go there. You just try to have conversations and try to convince guys to be a part of our team.”

Lillard did acknowledge some disappoint in not being able to get some top Blazers targets:

“Obviously, this go-round, we weren’t able to go out there and get some of the guys that we would have liked,” Lillard said. “You know, you go down the list and you go through the guys you like that are out there and haven’t committed to another team or that was a part of your plans in free agency and you get the ones that want to be a part of what you are doing, and I think that’s what we did.”

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The Blazers have agreed to deals with Cody Zeller, Tony Snell and Ben McLemore. Derrick Jones Jr. is back on his player option. Carmelo Anthony, Enes Kanter and Zach Collins went elsewhere, but Collins has barely played the last few years due to injury.

Portland's core will be virtually the same unless there's a big trade coming up. There hasn't been much out there about CJ McCollum, so as of right now, it doesn't seem like he's going anywhere.

Blazers general manager Neil Olshey seems content essentially running it back with a new coach in Chauncey Billups. We'll see if Dame is truly okay with that or if he decides to ask for a trade soon.