An Olympic gold medal perhaps doesn’t compare to some of the other accolades Portland Trail Blazers star Damian Lillard has managed to earn throughout his career. But there’s one game in the NBA that probably triggers fonder memories than defeating France in the final of the Tokyo Olympics.
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It was the 1st round of the 2014 playoffs against Houston Rockets. The Trail Blazers had gone toe to toe with the Rockets, but right at the buzzer, Lillard took off for a 3-pointer, stunning the Houston faithful 99-98, taking Portland to the Western Conference Semis for the first time in 14 years.
It’s been a few years since then, but Lillard naturally looks quite fondly at the memory of that night. In a moment of nostalgia, in fact, the Trail Blazers point guard revealed that that moment of madness came without the blessings of coach Terry Stotts.
Revealing what happened on the court on his own YouTube channel, Lillard claimed that his teammates had been egging him to finish the game with a flourish.
“I started to think like, ‘I am supposed to make it every time. I am never going to miss.’ That’s kind of how I started to think. So, you fast forward to a situation like Houston … In that moment, I wasn’t thinking like, ‘if we lose, we’re going to Game 7,’ Lillard said.
“I am just like, ‘it’s 0.9 seconds. We down 2. I am going for it,” Lillard added. As he was going up and down the court, Lillard realized that this was one of those games, where Stotts was taking the safe route. “‘Like, let’s just clear everybody out, let’s just lob it to LA and let’s go to overtime,'” he revealed.
But it just wasn’t “sitting right” with him. “‘Man, what if the pass doesn’t get there?’ I am thinking and Mo Williams is just walking because he’s lined up next to me. We are walking on court and he was like, ‘hey man, go get your god damn ball,'” reminisced Lillard about the tense few seconds before putting one through the bucket.
Of course, at this point, he was still conflicted about breaking the play because he had a lot of respect for his coach. But Williams encouraged him by reminding him that he had already been doing this all season, and he just needed to go get the ball. So as soon as he saw the referee handing the ball, he just took off, and less than a second later, so did the crowd.
“I just remember, after I made the shot, I was living in the arena. In Portland, everybody was going crazy,” a nostalgic Lillard said. He remembers people going on parades, waving their jerseys in ecstasy because moments like these hadn’t happened to them since 1999.
He was in his car with people outside going crazy, and if that wasn’t enough, practically every social media website he logged into, everybody was saying his name. “That was when ‘Dame Time’ really took off,” he added, noting however, that it also led to people just expecting to pull rabbits out of hats all the time.
But Lillard doesn’t really mind it. He understands the reality of having caught lightning in a bottle with tens of thousands of people watching. He might as well have walked on water that night!
