Damian Lillard is slowly but surely breaking out of the worst slump of his career. The Portland Trail Blazers superstar is averaging 24.8 points, 5.0 rebounds and 6.8 assists in his last five games, shooting 47.1% overall and 39.1% on a high volume of threes. Maybe those numbers don't reflect Lillard's MVP-level peak, but they still mark production befitting his status an annual contender for All-NBA honors—especially as he shoulders a slightly lesser load in Chauncey Billups' offensive system.
Those gaudy stats are made all the more impressive considering they've come while Lillard continues battling a long-nagging injury. He even missed Portland's blowout loss to the depleted Denver Nuggets on Sunday, sitting out with what the team deemed lower abdominal tendinopathy—the same core injury that Lillard finally admitted was bothering him after the Blazers fell to the Cleveland Cavaliers on November 4th.
A few days later, he came up limp on an uncontested layup in a loss to the LA Clippers, grabbing his midsection and grimacing in pain on his way down the floor.
You wouldn't have known Lillard wasn't healthy in Portland's much-needed, back-and-forth victory over the Toronto Raptors on Monday.
He got wherever he wanted offensively, regularly drawing two defenders in ball screen action and blowing right by the likes of Fred Van Vleet and Pascal Siakam in isolation. It probably wasn't his best performance of the young season, but the aggression and decisiveness with which Lillard attacked Toronto's cavalcade of long, active defenders off the bounce arguably made it his most encouraging.
Optimism springing from his stellar performance was tempered shortly after the game, though, when Bleacher Report's Sean Highkin asked Lillard about the state of his core injury.
“It's tight, irritated,” Lillard said. “It's frustrating, but I've been playing with it for the last three-and-a-half, four seasons. It's just frustrating. I'm ready to be playing in the prime of my career at 100 percent, and it's frustrating to not be able to do that over the last three, four years.”
Reports of Lillard's abdominal pain affecting his play at the Tokyo Olympics surfaced immediately after Team USA beat France in the gold medal game. He alluded to the injury last season following a February win over the Orlando Magic, calling his discomfort “normal” and adding that he trained to curb it over the offseason.
Lillard did specific work last summer to avoid re-aggravating his abdominals, too. Unfortunately, the daily grind of the regular season has made that impossible.
“At this point it's just gonna be managing it,” Lillard said of his injury. “This summer I rested a lot, took a lot of time. Did a lot of the training and the rehab stuff, foundation stuff. I'd been feeling really good, but obviously once you start playing so many games and the wear and tear of the season, you never know how that's gonna go. That's the frustrating part. It's just gonna be day-to-day managing it and finding a way to stay on the floor.”
Portland's ceiling depends on Lillard reaching his. Both developments seemed highly unlikely after the first two weeks of the regular season, as Lillard labored through a stretch that had some suggesting his days as one of basketball's truly elite players had come to a close.
His awesome play over the last five games has already proven that pessimism premature. But if Lillard's abdominal injury continues to nag at him over the season's remainder or even just worsens at the wrong time, it's safe to say the Blazers won't ever be at their ultimate best in 2021-22.
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