Damian Lillard Just Put On One Of The Greatest Playoff Performances You'll Ever See
Garrett Ellwood. Getty Images.
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What is it about these two teams that continue to give us these playoff instant classics? Make no mistake about it, if you stayed up late for this one you just witnessed the game of the playoffs so far. An absolute haymaker with the biggest stars in the league going blow for blow in a double OT thriller. I don't even care that the Blazers lost, what we saw Damian Lillard do in this game was some of the most insane shit you'll ever see on a basketball court
It all started with this GENEROUS call on Austin Rivers. That's tough. Very interested to see the L2M report on that one tomorrow
You knew what was coming next. I cannot think of a time where giving Dame another crack at breaking your heart has ever worked out. Guess what? It didn't work out
Credit to the Nuggets. Not only did they win this game because Nikola Jokic was a fucking monster with 38/11/9 of his own with maybe the best pass I've ever seen in my life
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but they also won despite their coach having no goddamn clue what he's doing. The Nuggets straight up refusing to foul Dame up 3 time and time again. Probably not the best idea when he's the best clutch player in the entire fucking league and time after time continued to rip your heart out
It got so bad we had Austin Rivers (who made some gigantic threes of his own) prayer to the gods whenever Dame actually missed a shot
For some unknown reason Dame decided to start passing the ball to his teammates, which was a terrible idea because those very teammates did nothing but let him down. First Robert Covington blew a wide open dunk late, then at the worst possible moment you had CJ stepping out of bounds
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talk about a kick right to the dick for Blazers fans. That sucks. The two times Dame doesn't take the shot, they fuck it up.
But let's also give credit to the supporting cast on the Nuggets side. Austin Rivers, Monte Morris with the game of his life, MPJ coming up huge late, this was about as big a win as you could get. You don't want to be going to Portland down 2-3. Massive win for them.
You just feel a little for Dame. The first ever 55/10 perfomance in NBA playoff history. Set a record for made threes. Had 55 on 17-24 (12-17) shooting. It's hard to do any more than what Dame did in this game. It's why the battle between him and Jokic was so much goddamn fun.
Imagine not watching the NBA playoffs? You idiots. You're missing out on nights like this. Imagine willingly not watching Damian Lillard and Nikola Jokic go at it. It's an absolute travesty that this game was on NBATV. Grow up NBA. This is one of the best series we have, the masses deserve to see it.
We had ourselves an instant classic tonight, no two ways about it.