3 questions the Portland Trail Blazers must answer to save its season in Game 5

Question No. 2: Can the Blazers coax more off-ball offense out of Damian Lillard?

The even better question at this point: should Damian Lillard even play?

If the decision were up to me, Lillard would be on the sidelines, modeling the best suit he brought for the Orlando trip he packed what he envisioned to be “the entire three months.” The reward doesn’t feel worth the risk. But for the sake of not knowing what his MRI will confirm, we’ll imagine the possibility that he could play. And if not, this is still something worth marinating on over the summer.

We knew that, in a series that paired the NBA’s top bubble offense against one of the best defenses, something had to give. We just didn’t know it would be the Los Angeles Lakers doing most, if not all of the taking.

From 1-to-5, Los Angeles was comprised of individually-productive defenders. But what they’ve been as a whole is greater than the sum of their parts, especially as it relates to how they’ve defended Damian Lillard.

Like a great defense plan does to any great quarterback, the Lakers have sent different looks Lillard’s way. Be it forcing the Blazers to look somewhere entirely different on inbounds to having their bigs creep into his airspace the second he comes off half-court pick-and-rolls, or even box-and-one-type defenses, they’ve taken what other regular season teams have done sparingly, and ratcheted it to the umpteenth power.

Last season, only Devin Booker was blitzed in the pick-and-roll more than Lillard (11.3 percent), a trend that drove upwards in the bubble.

That’s — whether non-Blazers fans are willing to admit it — superstar-level attention. Lillard’s productivity has drawn comparisons to players of Stephen Curry’s ilk. But if there’s one thing Curry’s been able to do that Lillard hasn’t, breaking the shackles of on-ball defense and becoming more of an off-ball threat could be it, if not just to keep Alex Caruso and the defense to dictate where he’s going.

In the regular season, Lillard averaged about 0.8 possessions per game off screens, and that provided 1.00 points per possession. It’s unclear whether this is an indictment towards Stotts, deep-rooted tendencies in Lillard as an on-ball scorer, or the lack of chemistry with these relatively new rotations. Per NBA.com, he topped out at 1.7 off-screen possessions per game in 2016-17, so it’s never been a major part of his game.

Perhaps it’s a straw-grasp, but it could be something that takes Lillard to the next level, a level beyond the astronomical level he’s already at. Earlier this morning, The Athletic’s Anthony Slater provided a film study on how Curry managed to pull defenses beyond their limits as an off-ball threat (not even a scorer sometimes).

If the Blazers do get sent home tomorrow night, many of their players will have tons to work on. Perhaps even Lillard, the player with certainly the fewest flaws on this team, could look into ways he can maximize himself going forward as an off-ball player.