Damian Lillard just buried a 3-0 Los Angeles Lakers team with a game-winning three, and the three-headed Portland backcourt everybody said would implode is somehow the best story in the NBA three games into the season.
Final score: Trail Blazers 136, Lakers 129. Lillard splashed his fourth three of the night with under a minute left, a step-back over Ziaire Williams that also froze former teammate Matisse Thybulle in his tracks, and Portland improved to 3-0, its best start since 2022. The Lakers walked in having won three straight. They walked out 3-1, and nobody in that building is talking about anything else today.
I got this one wrong over the summer, and I wasn’t alone.
When the Portland Trail Blazers built a backcourt around Lillard, Ja Morant, and Jrue Holiday, the entire basketball internet ran the same math: three guys who need the ball cannot share one basketball. It’s the type of take that sounds smart in July, because nobody has to prove it wrong until games get played. October showed up, and the box score from last night reads like a rebuttal somebody wrote on purpose.
Lillard finished with 21 points on four made threes. Morant put up 23 on 9-of-13 shooting. Jrue Holiday added 22 off the bench, and Deni Avdija chipped in 23 points and nine assists on top of it. Four Blazers in double figures, in the same game, against a team that had Luka Doncic playing out of his mind.
I play in a rec league in Hoboken on Tuesday nights, and if I tried that step-back on a defender half my speed I’d be on the floor clutching a hamstring. Lillard did it to an NBA defense at 36 years old, not that far removed from a ruptured Achilles, like it cost him nothing. Dame Time showed up right on cue, and the league noticed.
https://twitter.com/SportsCenter/status/2115323545928540314
And Doncic really was playing out of his mind. Forty-one points, nine assists, six threes, days after a 52-point outing in his last game. The Lakers didn’t lose this one because Luka had a quiet night. They lost it because Portland had an answer every time he didn’t, and that’s a problem the Lakers never had to solve while Doncic was enough on his own.
Morant is the part of this I actually want to sit with, because he’s the one nobody predicted correctly. He said over the summer that joining a new backcourt in Portland felt like starting over, and the easy read was a guy bracing for a rough adjustment. Three games in, starting over looks like a 23-point night on 9-for-13 shooting, next to two other guards who used to need 20 shots apiece to feel like themselves.
Nobody called that.
https://twitter.com/trailblazers/status/2115320248941547783
Now, the honest part: three games don’t settle anything. The Lakers just lost one to a hot team, and Luka Doncic is going to torch somebody else’s defense before Thanksgiving and make everyone forget this game happened. A guard-heavy rotation that looks seamless in late October can still get exposed in February, when the minutes pile up and shots get harder to find. Dame Time doesn’t come with a warranty.
But the thing everybody pre-wrote about this roster — too many mouths to feed, a locker room headed for a trade demand by Christmas — hasn’t shown up once. What’s shown up instead is the most balanced scoring line in the league through three games, with Ja Morant playing the best basketball of his Portland career in a uniform nobody expected him to still be wearing come fall.
I’ve watched the Thybulle clip four times now and I’m still not over it.
