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Opinion: Damian Lillard is the hero the NBA needs right now

Ted Berg   | For The Win

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Damian Lillard, what are you doing? Dude. Dude! Time is running out. Do you not know the score? It's tied, man. Why are you dribbling out the clock? Why are you — oh.

Ohhhhhhhh!

The first round of the NBA playoffs will feature no upsets, provided the Nuggets take care of business and finish off the Spurs tomorrow or Saturday. But the sixth-seeded Thunder were sort of a hipster pick to overtake the Blazers coming into their series, and Lillard, the Portland guard, ensured that it would not happen. Lillard put an exclamation point on the series by calmly drilling a 40-foot 3-pointer as time expired Tuesday night, then waved goodbye to the Thunder bench, then basically re-enacted the rap battle meme by remaining ice cold during the Blazers' celebration.

Lillard and the Blazers had feuded with Russell Westbrook and Oklahoma City all season, then Lillard took the Thunder apart in the playoff series, averaging 33 points per game and picking pockets left and right.

If you're, say, a fan of the New York Knicks or some other, less miserable NBA team that's not in the postseason, you're looking for a squad to embrace, and you're growing tired of the Warriors' increasingly tiresome and weirdly contentious dominance, might I suggest this guy Lillard and the Blazers?

After Kevin Durant joined the Warriors in 2016, Lillard said that it was Durant's choice to make, but that he would never join up with a so-called "super team" and added, "that's just not who I am. I might just have too much pride for that or be too much of a competitor where I couldn't bring myself to do it. But it also makes it more fun. You get to take a monster down, and that's always fun."

So that's cool. The underrated Lillard and his Blazers teammates will likely be underdogs in every series they play from here on out this year, and he seems happy to embrace it.

Writing this newsletter means diving a bit deeper into sports and athletes that I normally enjoy only passively, so I learned a bunch about Lillard by diving through the Damian Lillard tag on this site this morning. Join me on this journey, friends.

I already knew that Lillard raps, but I did not realize that his rapping had earned the praise of no less an authority than the actual Lil Wayne. Lillard also blew Gary Busey's mind with a freestyle at an Oakland radio station in 2016, over the beat from Luniz' "I Got 5 On It."

Lillard donated a gym, a weight room and a music studio to Oakland High School. He breaks sports media news. He dressed like Stone Cold Steve Austin for Halloween. LeBron James recognizes that he's good at both rapping and basketball. He stares down his haters. He convinced his teammates to give their entire 2017 postseason bonus to behind-the-scenes team staffers. He does nice things for senior citizens and helps fans with their marriage proposals.

The constant qualifier is that I don't know this guy personally, but it sure seems like Lillard rules. And it strikes me that if the Blazers can get past the winner of the Spurs-Nuggets series in the conference semi-finals, Lillard would serve as the perfect foil for Golden State (or Houston) in the Western Conference finals. He'd be the guy who says he'll never join a super team facing off with the league's most prominent super team, and a dude who appears to be Oakland through and through squaring off with the club that's playing its final season in Oakland.

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