Evanson: Damian Lillard may have left Portland, but there's nothing more Portland than what's happening to Dame now

You can get Dame out of Portland, but you can’t get Portland out of Dame — seemingly.

By the time you read this, the former Trail Blazer standout might have already been shown the playoff door just five games into the 2024 NBA postseason.

With his new team, the Milwaukee Bucks, trailing the Indiana Pacers 3-1 in their best-of-seven series, Lillard — along with the superstar running mate he so desperately desired when he asked out of Portland this past fall, Giannis Antetokounmpo — is watching from the sidelines as a result of a strained Achilles he aggravated in Game 3, leaving a shell of a team left to fight for his playoff life before it ever really got started.

If it weren’t so sad, it’d be comical.

Lillard toiled for years in Portland minus the help he needed to reach his championship dreams. Now, after begrudgingly requesting a trade from the city and franchise he hoped to bring a title, and in an effort to better compete for one himself, the 33-year-old All-Star guard is again left with the limited firepower he thought he was leaving behind in the Rose City.

Dame has consistently said he hopes to someday return to Rip City to either finish or retire as a Trail Blazer. This is where he started his career, and throughout his 11-year tenure in Portland, where he got married, started a family, put down business roots, and ultimately became one of us. But maybe in the process of becoming an Oregonian or more specifically a “Trail Blazer for life,” he fell victim to the plague that’s been haunting the franchise’s fans for coming up on 50 years.

The Blazers won their last — and only title — in 1977. Since then, the franchise and their loyal supporters have been on a nearly half-century roller coaster ride that’s approached, but never quite reached the ultimate height — a championship.

They’ve won six division titles, two conference titles, and in 1992 reached Game 6 of their best-of-seven championship series with Michael Jordan’s Bulls, only to blow a 15-point second half lead, extinguishing their best hopes of hanging a banner they haven’t hung since Bill Walton habitually rode his bike through Northwest Portland to practice.

As part of that ride, fans have seen their share of ups, but they’ve too seen the downs that have more popularly come to define the organization as a whole.

There were the “Jail Blazer” years where a team full of miscreants repeatedly shamed the team and city as the result of on and off the court behavior.

A titanic meltdown in the Game 7 of the 2000 Western Conference Finals where they parlayed a 13-point fourth-quarter lead into a five-point defeat to the hated Los Angeles Lakers.

The steep decline of All-Star guard Brandon Roy who was forced to retire from the game after just five seasons due to a debilitating knee condition.

Of course, passing on Michael Jordan for Kentucky center Sam Bowie.

And lest we forget — Greg Oden. The generational and franchise-changing center who Portland took with the first overall pick in 2007, and who ultimately played only 82 games in a Trail Blazer uniform and just 105 total in his NBA career as the result of a litany of knee injuries.

I wouldn’t exactly call that the city of Cleveland-level woes, but with that said, even they’ve hoisted a trophy more recently than Portland.

Maybe we are cursed, and maybe as part of his decade-long indoctrination to the great state of Oregon, Damian Lillard unwittingly sold his soul to that same curse and is now suffering because of it.

He stays, he loses.

He goes, he still loses.

It doesn’t seem right, but it does seem fitting.

Sorry, Dame.