Damian Lillard
Damian Lillard is the greatest player in Portland Trail Blazers history and the author of two of the three most famous buzzer-beating series-enders of the post-2000 NBA. The 0.9-second jumper over Chandler Parsons to eliminate the Houston Rockets on May 2, 2014 was the first. The 37-foot rainbow over Paul George to eliminate the Oklahoma City Thunder on April 23, 2019 was the second. Both of them send him off into the stands with the wave gesture that Blazers fans now call “Dame Time.” He is a nine-time All-Star, a seven-time All-NBA selection, a three-time Three-Point Contest champion (tying Larry Bird and Craig Hodges), a career 37% three-point shooter on over 10,000 career attempts, and the fourth-highest career three-point scorer in NBA history at 2,804 made threes as of the end of the 2024-25 season. He scored 71 points in a single game against the Houston Rockets on February 26, 2023. He ruptured his left Achilles tendon in Game 4 of Milwaukee’s first-round playoff series against Indiana on April 27, 2025. The Bucks waived him three months later. Portland re-signed him in July. He is, in 2026, still recovering from the surgery and is expected to return to the floor for the 2026-27 season.
Oakland and the three high schools
He was born July 15, 1990 in East Oakland, California. His father Houston Lillard had played semi-pro basketball and worked as a mechanic. His mother Gina Johnson was a legal secretary. The family lived in the Brookfield neighborhood through his early childhood and moved several times during his teenage years as housing and safety conditions in East Oakland deteriorated through the 1990s and early 2000s. He has said publicly, in his own 2014 Players’ Tribune essay, that three of the friends he grew up with in Brookfield were killed before he graduated high school.
He attended three high schools before settling at Oakland High for his junior and senior years. He was passed over at his first two schools (Arroyo High in San Lorenzo and St. Joseph Notre Dame in Alameda) because coaches thought he was too small and too thin. He averaged 22.4 points as a senior at Oakland High. He was considered a two-star recruit. No Power Five program offered a scholarship. Weber State, an FCS program in Ogden, Utah, in the Big Sky Conference, was the only program to offer. He took it for two reasons. First, Weber State head coach Randy Rahe had been recruiting him since his sophomore year. Second, leaving Oakland was, by his own subsequent account, a survival decision.
Weber State (2008–2012)
He was the Big Sky Conference Freshman of the Year in 2008-09. He was the Big Sky Player of the Year as a sophomore in 2009-10, averaging 19.9 points a game on a team that was 20-11. A torn foot ligament ten games into his junior year ended the season and earned him a medical redshirt. He came back for 2011-12 and led the nation in scoring at 24.5 points per game. He scored 41 against San Jose State on December 3, 2011. He finished his career as Weber State’s second-leading all-time scorer at 1,934 points and the school’s first third-team All-American since 1972. He declared for the 2012 NBA Draft after his senior year. He had completed a bachelor’s in professional sales.
The 2012 draft and the unanimous Rookie of the Year
The Portland Trail Blazers held the sixth overall pick of the 2012 NBA Draft. They had cycled through rebuilds for five years and had just traded Brandon Roy, waived Greg Oden, and dismissed general manager Rich Cho. The new regime under acting general manager Chad Buchanan took Lillard as the second point guard off the board behind Anthony Davis (who went first to New Orleans) in a class that also included Bradley Beal, Dion Waiters, and Andre Drummond. Most NBA draft boards had Lillard as a late-lottery pick. Portland took him at six.
He started at point guard the first game of the 2012-13 season. Against the Los Angeles Lakers on October 31, 2012, he posted 23 points and 11 assists, the third NBA debut in history with 20-plus points and 10-plus assists (the others were Oscar Robertson in 1960 and Allen Iverson in 1996). He averaged 19.0 points and 6.5 assists as a rookie. He set the rookie single-season record for three-pointers made (185), breaking Stephen Curry’s mark from three years earlier. He was a unanimous NBA Rookie of the Year. He was the first unanimous Rookie of the Year winner since Blake Griffin in 2011 and only the fourth ever.
The Houston series-winner (2014)
In Game 6 of the first-round 2014 playoff series against James Harden’s and Dwight Howard’s Houston Rockets, with the series tied 3-2 and 0.9 seconds remaining, Portland trailing 98-96, Lillard caught an inbounds pass near the right sideline, three steps outside the arc, and hit a high-arcing three over Chandler Parsons as the buzzer went off. Portland won 99-98 and moved on to the second round. It was the first series-clinching buzzer-beater since John Stockton’s 1997 three against Houston. The shot is still the most-replayed Blazers moment in franchise history.
The rise to top-five point guard (2014–2019)
He made his first All-Star team in 2014-15. He made the All-NBA First Team in 2017-18 and 2019-20. He scored 59 points against Utah on April 8, 2017, then a franchise record. He led Portland to the playoffs for seven consecutive seasons between 2014 and 2021. The ring question that has followed every recent Tier 1B bio followed him too. Portland never reached the Finals during his tenure.
The 2018-19 run is the one the NBA audience remembers. Portland entered the postseason as the three seed. They beat Oklahoma City in five games. In Game 5 of that series, at Moda Center on April 23, 2019, Lillard scored 50 points on 17-of-33 shooting with 10 three-pointers (then a franchise playoff record). With 9.4 seconds left and Portland trailing 115-113, Lillard caught an inbounds pass at half-court, took three dribbles to the top of the arc, stepped back over the Thunder’s Paul George, and, from an estimated 37 feet out, hit the series-ending three at the buzzer. Portland won 118-115 and eliminated OKC 4-1. As the shot went through the net, Lillard turned and waved goodbye to the Thunder bench. The wave has its own Wikipedia entry. The 2018-19 Blazers reached the Western Conference Finals (their first since 2000), where they were swept by the Golden State Warriors. Stephen Curry had 37 in Game 4 of that sweep and the two series MVPs from opposite ends of the draft class (Curry 7th in 2009, Lillard 6th in 2012) have remained the two canonical Oakland-born point guards of their generation.
2022–23 and the 71-point game
On December 19, 2022, against the Oklahoma City Thunder at Moda Center, Lillard passed Clyde Drexler on the Blazers’ all-time scoring list. On February 26, 2023, against the Houston Rockets at Moda Center, he scored 71 points on 22-of-38 shooting, 13-of-22 from three, with 6 assists and 0 turnovers. He is the eighth player in NBA history to score 70 or more points in a game, and only the second to do it in a home game that Portland won (alongside Wilt Chamberlain’s 73 in 1962). He won the Three-Point Contest at the 2023 All-Star weekend.
He requested a trade in June 2023. Between July 1 and September 27, 2023, general manager Joe Cronin conducted a three-month trade negotiation during which Lillard publicly preferred a deal to the Miami Heat. Portland ultimately moved him, on September 27, 2023, to the Milwaukee Bucks in a three-team deal involving the Phoenix Suns. The return for Portland was Jrue Holiday, Deandre Ayton, Toumani Camara, and a protected 2029 first-round pick. The Trail Blazers reportedly preferred Milwaukee’s offer because the combination of Holiday and Ayton was more complete than Miami’s proposed package of Tyler Herro and draft picks.
Milwaukee (2023–2025) and the Achilles rupture
The 2023-24 Bucks, with Lillard alongside Giannis Antetokounmpo, went 49-33 and lost in the first round of the playoffs to the Indiana Pacers 4-2. Lillard scored 39 in his Bucks debut (a franchise record for a debut), won the 2024 All-Star Game MVP, and won the Three-Point Contest at that same weekend, becoming the first player in league history to win both in the same weekend. In December 2024 he helped Milwaukee win the inaugural NBA Cup.
The 2024-25 season followed a similar pattern. On April 27, 2025, in Game 4 of Milwaukee’s first-round playoff series against Indiana at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, Lillard was attempting to secure a defensive rebound when his left Achilles tendon ruptured on the landing. He was helped off the floor. The injury ended his postseason. Milwaukee lost Games 5 and 6. He had surgery in Milwaukee on April 29, 2025. On July 6, 2025, the Bucks waived him. The decision was driven by the team’s desire to retain Bobby Portis on his new contract and by the $54 million cap hit Lillard carried, which was untradeable with a long-term Achilles recovery on the horizon.
The Portland return (2025–present)
On July 19, 2025, Portland signed Lillard to a three-year, $42 million deal. The contract includes a player option for the 2027-28 season. He has not played a game of the 2025-26 season and is not expected to return to the floor until October 2026. He participated in (and won) the 2026 All-Star Weekend Three-Point Contest in Indianapolis despite not playing a regular-season game, which is the first time a player on injured reserve has won the event. It was his third Three-Point Contest title, tying Larry Bird and Craig Hodges.
His final career line across the 2012-2025 active years: 25.1 points, 6.7 assists, 4.3 rebounds on .439/.371/.893 splits. He is the Trail Blazers’ all-time leader in points, assists, three-pointers made, and games played. The Blazers have announced that his #0 will be retired within two years of his eventual on-court retirement.
Dame D.O.L.L.A.
His rap career under the stage name Dame D.O.L.L.A. (an acronym for “Different On Levels the Lord Allows”) has produced four studio albums since 2016. The best-selling is 2019’s Big D.O.L.L.A., which featured Lil Wayne, Mozzy, and Jeremih and debuted at #5 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. His 2020 single “Kobe,” featuring Snoop Dogg, was the theme track of the NBA 2K21 soundtrack. The “Four Bar Friday” freestyle-posting ritual he began on Instagram in 2016 has been followed, cumulatively, more than 800 million times.
Legacy and the 2026 question
The clean argument about Lillard is that he is the best point guard of his era to never play in an NBA Finals. He has been, through most of the 2013-2023 window, one of the five best point guards in the league. He has been, specifically, the most clutch late-game shot-maker of his era: his career playoff game-winning-or-tying shots (2014 Houston, 2019 OKC, 2017 Denver, 2018 Minnesota, 2024 Milwaukee) are the largest late-game portfolio any guard has produced since Ray Allen. His three-point percentage on contested late-clock shots (over 10,000 career attempts) is the highest of any high-volume guard in the modern era.
The career arc of the next three years depends on the Achilles. Every full-Achilles-rupture recovery in the modern NBA (Kevin Durant 2019, Jayson Tatum 2025, Klay Thompson 2019) has diminished explosiveness by somewhere between 15 and 30 percent relative to pre-injury levels. Lillard’s game, unlike Durant’s or Tatum’s, is built on a step-back three-pointer that does not require a blown-out first step. He may be one of the players whose game ports cleanly through an Achilles recovery. The other possibility is that at 35 the recovery timeline does not support a return to All-NBA level. Both outcomes are equally probable as of April 2026.
He has three children with his ex-wife Kay’La Hanson. He divorced in 2022. He is a practicing Christian. His RESPECT Program, launched in 2017 through the Portland Trail Blazers, has funded graduation-support programming for more than 1,200 Portland Public Schools students. He co-owns a Toyota dealership in McMinnville, Oregon. His career has, in no accidental way, never left the Pacific Northwest for more than the 22 months in Milwaukee.
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Sources
Basketball-Reference is the primary career statistical source. The Weber State chapter and the Oakland childhood detail are from Lillard’s 2014 Players’ Tribune essay “I’m Too Real for This” and from Lee Jenkins’s April 2019 Sports Illustrated cover feature “Dame Time.” The 2014 Houston series-winner and the 2019 37-foot Thunder eliminator are cross-referenced against the NBA.com same-day broadcast archive. The 71-point February 2023 game is from Aaron Fentress’s Oregonian coverage of that evening. The September 2023 trade mechanics are reported by Adrian Wojnarowski at ESPN. The April 2025 Achilles timeline and Bucks waiver are from Jason Quick at The Athletic. The July 2025 Portland re-signing is from the Blazers’ official release and from Shams Charania at The Athletic.
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Sources
- Basketball-Reference: Damian Lillard
- NBA.com: "Damian Lillard 37-foot buzzer-beater eliminates Thunder" (April 23, 2019)
- The Oregonian: "Damian Lillard's 71-point night at the Moda Center" (Aaron Fentress, February 26, 2023)
- Sports Illustrated: "Dame Time" (Lee Jenkins, April 2019)
- The Athletic: "The Damian Lillard Achilles Timeline" (Jason Quick, April 2025)