Damian Lillard’s future with the Portland Trail Blazers is up in the air after the player urged the team to add the right pieces to compete for the championship, which never happened. Now the player has a decision to make after a poor free agency by the organization.
Lillard has big questions to answer this summer, and so have the Blazers. They aren’t in a good position to compete for the title, while the rest of the NBA bolstered their squads, trying to dethrone the Milwaukee Bucks.
Talking about the team’s moves in the offseason, Dame said they didn’t get some of the players he would’ve liked to play with but agreeing that’s part of the process in the free market.
Via Joe Vardon of The Athletic:
“When you go into free agency and things like this, you never know what happens,” Lillard said during a media availability at the Tokyo Olympics. “You never know where guys are going to end up and why they go there. You just try to have conversations and convince guys to be a part of our team.
“And obviously, this go around, we wasn’t able to go out there and just get some of the guys that we would have liked, and you go down the list and you go through the guys that are out there that you like who haven’t committed to a team or was a part of your plans in free agency and you get the ones that want to be a part of what you’re doing. And I think that’s what we did.”
Back in the day, the All-Star point guard revealed he’s yet to make a final decision on his future, not closing the door to a potential exit from Moda Center. He’s been linked with several teams in prior weeks, and Dame has made it clear he wants to win. If the Blazers can’t help, then he would take a different path.
“I haven’t made any firm decision on what my future will be,” Lillard said after a Team USA practice prior to the Tokyo Olympics, adding he didn’t think the Blazers were currently a championship team, even with new coach Chauncey Billups.
Lillard added that although he expected to be in a Blazers uniform next season and wanted to finish his career in Portland, he desires to win a championship: “Over time, you want to win it all. And we have to make strides to do that.
This is a complex situation for the Blazers. They can lose their best player if things don’t improve soon. They have no intentions of trading CJ McCollum, who could be a currency exchange to get more pieces for Dame. This situation doesn’t seem to have a good ending for the franchise, but we won’t know what will happen until Lillard returns from Tokyo.
