Subscribe
Follow Us
MILWAUKEE — Halfway through the first quarter of the Milwaukee Bucks' Game 4 loss to the Indiana Pacers, superstar guard Damian Lillard went down with a potentially season-ending injury.
Head coach Doc Rivers was the first staffer to reach Lillard, putting his arm around his clearly ailing point guard and helping him off the court and into the locker room. Postgame, Rivers talked about moving forward to gameplan for Game 5 on Tuesday when the Pacers, up 3-1 in the series, can close out the Bucks. But that wouldn't happen right away.
“My brain right now is right in the same place as the players, and that's thinking about Dame,” Rivers told reporters. “That's just a human part of the job. That's really no fun. It really isn't. You know, it's just tough.”
Rivers acknowledged that Lillard's injury hit with more force than most. He'd battled back from a different scary diagnosis, deep vein thrombosis, that cost him the last 31 days of the season. He recovered quicker than anyone could have expected, getting back on the floor for Game 2 of the Pacers' series. Lillard has the respect and love of the entire organization.
“He's just such a great freaking dude, like, on a basketball level, but more important, as a teammate and a father and all that stuff,” Rivers said. “And you know, no one deserves it, but golly, you just look at him. And so that's why I feel bad. It's just tough.”
Rivers said he and his staff were back to where they started the series, planning an offensive and defensive attack for the Bucks without Lillard. He vowed that he and his staffers would study film overnight and have a gameplan ready for the team by the morning.
“My job over the next, you know, 40 hours or whatever we have, is to get us upright again, try to win one game in Indiana and get it back here,” he said. “We just got to figure it out. You know, as a staff, we got to figure out the right rotations for this group. We got to really come up with better spacing offensively and a better defensive plan for the game.”
Bucks backup point guard Kevin Porter Jr. told reporters it was especially hard seeing Lillard go down so soon after his last setback.
“Dame's one of them special ones,” he said. “Seeing him go down and not be able to return is definitely, it's definitely, you know, defeating as a brother.”
Porter said Lillard's injury felt like an immediate call to action, which he answered by scoring 23 points on 9-for-17 shooting to go along with six assists and five rebounds. He dared anyone to count them out.
“If any team can come back from 3-1, it's this team,” he said. “This is definitely far from over.”
Up next: Game 5 in Indianapolis on Tuesday night.
