The Portland Trail Blazers have taken down the Los Angeles Lakers in epic comeback fashion to get their season off to a 3-0, and at the end of the game, we saw some classic gamesmanship from the leader of the Blazers, Damian Lillard.
I live for Russell Westbrook's crunch time decision-making pic.twitter.com/9juahOx59k
— Josh Paredes (@Josh810) October 23, 2022
Late in the game with just over 30 seconds to go and a 1 point lead, Russ carried the ball up, and wanting to put the game on ice with a dagger, he takes a shot with 18 seconds on the shot clock, constituting a 12 second differential with the game clock, and as we know due to the Blazers win, he bricked it. While there’s plenty to say about this one, and it could have just been a coincidence, but Lillard makes a fantastic veteran move here, as he set a screen for Westbrook on his own teammate, isolating Russ, daring him to take the jump shot, and as we saw, it was a brilliant move that forced the miss, and eventually helped the Blazers jump to 3-0 on the young season.
Much has been made of the Westbrook experiment in Los Angeles, and that word has clearly reached the rest of the players, and after the team put Jusuf Nurkic on Russ late in the game, it’s become very clear that teams just don’t respect him, so this was a fantastic move for Dame to make en route to the amazing victory.