With NBA Cup title, Damian Lillard gets a taste of why he joined Milwaukee Bucks
LAS VEGAS – The first time Damian Lillard hit a game-winning, buzzer-beating shot in a Milwaukee Bucks uniform on Jan. 14, sending Sacramento home in overtime as he tapped his wrist, Fiserv Forum exploded and Giannis Antetokounmpo nearly choked him out with a celebratory hug around the neck.
Afterwards, Lillard would go on to explain why he doesn’t smile in such moments. It’s expected. He’s done it before.
Fast forward just over 11 months. In the final moments of the Bucks’ 97-81 victory over Oklahoma City in the Emirates NBA Cup final at T-Mobile Arena, Antetokounmpo grabbed Lillard by the back of the head and pulled him into his arm for a hug. Lillard pounded his teammate’s back with a fist.
This was clearly different.
Minutes later, Lillard had a smile as bright as the neon along Las Vegas Boulevard, first as Antetokounmpo raised the NBA Cup and then when he handed it to his second-year teammate. Lillard cradled the gold trophy, then carried to the locker room. He held it at dinner.
“I feel happy,” he said, quite simply, after the game.
“The experience of winning something. I've had a lot of experience individually where I've had accomplishments and stuff, but to have some team success and win something and be the last team standing in this tournament, it feels great.”
Make no mistake, this is not the end goal. If the Bucks don’t reach the NBA Finals, there will no doubt be some disappointment. But Lillard asked for a trade out of Portland for a chance to win.
The Bucks won something with him at point guard.
“It’s a good taste,” Bucks wing Pat Connaughton, who also played with Lillard in Portland, told the Journal Sentinel. “An analogy I’ll use is we’re looking for a five-course meal and he had a great appetizer with this. He’ll say the same thing, there’s bigger, there’s better, there’s more things we’ve got to get better at. It’s a steppingstone, it’s a good measuring stick, whatever analogy he uses it’ll mean the same thing. But I do think it’s something that he enjoys being a part of.
“He is competitive to the core – a lot of players are – but he is even on another level and for him to be put a tournament setting, he wants to win. To your point, this is the first time he’s been able to do it. It’s the first time the Milwaukee Bucks have won the in-season tournament as well, so it’s nice to have that exact same moment and memory of a first with him.”
It’s a first for 12 other players on the current roster as well, as only five players remain from the 2021 NBA championship team. Taurean Prince won an NBA Cup last year with the Los Angeles Lakers, but it’s his first with this group in Milwaukee.
To a man they acknowledged the end goal of winning the NBA title, but to go through an elimination setting and come out on top was significant for them.
But perhaps no more significant than for a Top 75 player in NBA history that, to date, had yet to be a part of such a thing.
“It’s great to see him and anything he do in a winning light,” former Trail Blazers and current Bucks guard Gary Trent Jr. told the Journal Sentinel. “I’m right here – he does everything right, he does everything for the game in the correct way and hopefully that pays you back in the long run. Being here to have his first chance at winning something with this group as well, this team as well – everybody moved here, everybody tried to figure it out, new faces, new energy – it’s great. Hopefully we can be in June time.”
Bucks center Brook Lopez had a front-row spot to see Lillard soak in the scene as confetti fluttered down from the rafters.
“It’s cool to see,” Lopez told the Journal Sentinel. “It’s so cool to see. He’s so deserving. Obviously there’s players in the history of the league that are deserving like that, but we’re obviously all playing for each other but I’m sure there are a lot of us that are playing for him as well. I know the guys on our team that haven’t experienced that are totally deserving of it.”
Now, the Bucks move on right back into the regular season. They play the best team in the Eastern Conference on Friday night in the 23-4 Cleveland Cavaliers at Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse, a place the Cavs have lost just once.
The Bucks are 0-2 against the Cleveland to date.
And then they head right back to Milwaukee on a back-to-back to play Washington. The grind continues. Time will tell if winning the NBA Cup means anything in the grander team construct than that singular moment Tuesday night, but it no doubt had an impact on the second-most important player on the team.
“He’s trying to win an NBA championship for his first time and I think he carries himself just like the five of us do, he just hasn’t had that experience yet,” Connaughton said. “Our goal is get him that experience, his goal is to help us get another one.
“I think it’s a good observation. It’s something that I think he appreciates, he never takes for granted, he never expects, he appreciates every step of the journey."
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