Damian Lillard and the Blazers Talk His Game-Saving Drawn Charge Against Golden State

Damian Lillard again came up biggest when it mattered most, but not just on the offensive side of the ball – and his teammates and coaches weren't surprised.

Jack Winter

Damian Lillard and the Blazers Talk His Game-Saving Drawn Charge Against Golden State
Damian Lillard and the Blazers Talk His Game-Saving Drawn Charge Against Golden State /

Damian Lillard, at least as he tells it, just made the simple play to seal his team's victory over the Golden State Warriors on Thursday.

 "I kind of turned and took a peak at the action and just watched how it developed," Lillard said of his game-saving charge. "Once we ran Draymond off the line and he was coming downhill pretty fast, I waited a second to make sure that he was going to commit to going to the rim, and once he did I just stepped in and took the charge."

Easy, right?

No way. 

Lillard knew that Draymond Green is loath to take open three-pointers, and knew that the 31-year-old doesn't quite have the vertical pop he did during heydays of the Warriors' dynasty. The Blazers left Green wide open with the game on the line for a reason. He's not exactly a threatening scorer, no matter where he is on the floor.

Still, the guile and gumption it takes to draw a charge at the rim in the waning seconds of a game your team leads by two is rare. Other players on Portland's roster may very well have made the same play, with Lillard's expert sense of timing and technique. 

But his coaches and teammates certainly didn't seem surprised it was Lillard who made the game's biggest play in its biggest moment, especially after he'd put Portland ahead on the previous possession with a pull-up triple.

"He's a super competitor, and never thinks he's out of a game and is always willing to put himself on the line to make the play at either end," Terry Stotts said of Lillard. "I think those last two plays speak volumes for the type of player that he is."

Robert Covington echoed his coach's comments almost verbatim.

"Dame at the end made two big plays," he said. "That's what he does. For him to step in and take that charge, that just shows the type of player he is."

Carmelo Anthony, who played a key role in the Blazers' hard-fought victory, stressed the cultural impact of a superstar playmaker like Lillard putting his body on the line to take a charge. 

"He made winning plays. He made shots when it counted. But forget the shots," Anthony said of Lillard. "That charge he took, that defensive play that he gave his body up for, that's a winning play. That's what winning players do, that's winning teams do, and he stepped up to the challenge today."

C.J. McCollum and Jusuf Nurkic certainly seemed pleased with Lillard's two-way efforts late in the game, too.

Lillard scored Portland's last eight points on Wednesday. He's up to a mind-blowing 61.4 percent shooting in the clutch, including 12-of-21 from deep and 26-of-26 from the free-throw line. Lillard's true shooting percentage in crunchtime is a laughable and league-leading 83.0, per NBA.com/stats. 

Some factors can't be measured by the box score or analytics. Lillard's drawn charge isn't one of them, but the attitude that put him in position to take it is nevertheless an indication of why he's become one of the most devastating crunch-time performers in NBA history.

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Jack Winter
JACK WINTER

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