On a Sunday in February, Damian Lillard, the Portland Trail Blazers’ virtuosic point guard, scored seventy-one points against the Houston Rockets. When defenders hounded him on the perimeter, he executed quick crossover dribbles to create a sliver of space or stutter-stepped into three-point shots. He ignored the hands in his face; he blew by defenders on his way to the rim. There seemed to be no shot that he was not willing to try, and he made most of them. With a minute left in the second quarter, he calmly carried the ball across half-court, pulled up with one foot still on the center-court logo, and sunk a thirty-six-footer. Fans laughed in delight. Lillard’s face, as ever, was impassive. Only a jaunty little skip toward the defensive end betrayed any feeling.
He had forty-one points by halftime, and his final tally was among the highest in N.B.A. history. And yet it was barely notable in the context of this season. It was, after all, the second time a player had scored seventy-one this year; Donovan Mitchell did it for the Cleveland Cavaliers in early January. The stat lines this season have been routinely extraordinary. Six players are currently averaging more than thirty points per game. (No more than three players have done that in a single season since 1962.) Forty-three players are averaging more than twenty points per game. (The record for a season is twenty-three.) Individual players have scored fifty points or more twenty-four times this season, which is already a record. During the 2014-15 season, that feat was accomplished eight times.
Lillard scored at least fifty points three times in the first two months of 2023 alone. So central is Lillard to the Trail Blazers’ play, and to their identity, that there is a universal sense that Portland needs to win a title for Lillard, not the other way around. When it became clear, this past weekend, that the Blazers were out of the playoff chase, the Athletic’s Shams Charania reported that the team was strongly considering shutting Lillard down rather than risk injury.
The tendency for players to challenge defenders one-on-one or take high-risk shots used to be called hero ball, and it was said with a sneer. It was point hunting, a player bending the game by ego and will. It was a wing flying up the court and pulling up in the midrange instead of finding the guy driving toward the rim, or a point guard dribbling directly into the defense instead of swinging the ball to an open man in the corner. Sometimes it was great: Tracy McGrady scoring thirteen points in thirty-five seconds against the Spurs; LeBron James, surrounded by Pistons, scoring twenty-five straight points in the 2007 Eastern Conference finals; Kobe Bryant going for eighty-one points. But often it was bad—as strategy, for sure, but also, to hear the light note of scorn with which it was described, as aesthetics and morality.
This perspective wasn’t wrong, exactly. A star player harassed by three defenders is often less effective in the clutch than a role player left alone. Too many teams were focussed on getting the ball to the best guy instead of to the open one, and too many players wanted to take the first and last shot. Not everyone could be Michael Jordan. (Even Jordan was sometimes better off finding an open Steve Kerr.) Teams, or at least the good ones, started to pick up the pace, implementing a more freewheeling style with a multipronged offense. I once saw a jaded N.B.A. analyst grow misty at the memory of a certain sequence of passes made by the 2014 Spurs. And why not? Their play was good, and often beautiful, to behold.
All that emphasis on coöperation and sharing—the N.B.A. as nursery school—seems a little quaint now. Never before has the league been so reliant on stars, and to terrific effect. As of last weekend, N.B.A. teams were averaging 114.6 points per game, the highest mark in more than fifty years. In late February, the Sacramento Kings and the Los Angeles Clippers combined for three hundred and fifty-one points in a double-overtime game, the second most in history. The Kings have an offensive rating of 118.9. The 1995 Chicago Bulls, who won seventy-two games and are considered by many to be the best team in history, had an offensive rating of 115.2, which would currently make them tied with the Trail Blazers for tenth place.
The comparison, of course, is bogus—no one would say that these Kings are better than the ’95 Bulls. The game has changed, hugely. New rules limiting defenders on the perimeter made it harder to defend three-point shooters; front offices and coaching staffs, having discovered the esoteric fact that three points are more than two, have become more savvy about discouraging difficult midrange two-point shots and setting up open threes. (Lillard, for one, averaged around six three-point attempts per game his rookie year; this year, he’s attempting more than eleven.) Teams began spacing good shooters around the perimeter and ran offensive sets—notably, high pick-and-rolls, in which the ball handler works in tandem with a big man at the top of the arc—that forced defenders to make impossible decisions and gave the ball handler plenty of options to shoot, drive down the empty lane for a dunk, or pass to a teammate poised to take a three.
And more players became capable of making those long shots at a decent rate, no matter their official position. Pretty much every player on an N.B.A. roster can now run, dribble, pass, and score. It used to be that teams could afford to leave a player or two alone, freeing up defenders to focus on those who were more likely to score. But there aren’t as many guards who take a lot of inefficient shots, and big plodding centers no longer clog the floor. The democratization of skill has stretched defenses, creating space and matchups that are hard to defend. The worst teams in the league now are far more efficient offensively than the best teams were twenty years ago.
The surprise, and the irony, is that the more good players there are, the more important the great ones have become. The proliferation of offensive threats has meant that defenses can’t train their attention all on one person; that means that there are better shots for the best players to take, and the best players have become even better at making them. They have more room to drive to the basket, where shots are hyper-efficient. They are more practiced and skilled at hitting long threes. They are better at drawing fouls and savvier about off-ball movement, picks, and screens. Most of all, perhaps, they can pass, and the threat of those passes makes them harder to defend. More than ever, offenses revolve around a single star—a phenomenon that many around the N.B.A. have taken to calling heliocentrism, a term that the Athletic writer Seth Partnow used in a 2019 column describing the Dallas Mavericks star Luka Dončić. Hero ball “didn’t go away,” Kirk Goldsberry, an ESPN analyst, told the podcast “ESPN Daily.” “It just went to M.I.T., got a degree in analytics, and rebranded as heliocentrism.”
Among the newish stats that people now use to analyze basketball is something called usage rate, which measures the percentage of a team’s plays that run through a particular player on the floor. (There are slightly different ways to calculate usage, some of which emphasize passing more than others.) Dončić has one of the highest career usage rates in N.B.A. history. He is his team’s primary ball handler, playmaker, and shot creator. Dončić is unique—creative, skilled, deft, daring—but he’s playing in a league where a number of teams each have their own unicorns, and several of them have historically high usage rates, too. Recently, after losing to the Phoenix Suns, the Charlotte Hornets’ coach, Steve Clifford, acknowledged that defenses can’t simply do the basic things right—play hard, rebound, and refrain from fouling—and expect to stop those star players. Offenses have become too good. High efficiency plus high usage has led to a lot of points, night after night, often concentrated among stars.
Lillard was drafted, by the Trail Blazers, in 2012. He began taking over games, single-handed, from the start. He thrived in the fourth quarter, with a flair for clutch shots and an icy resolve. The crazier the shot—the longer the range, the more defenders, the higher the degree of difficulty—the better. After sinking a thirty-three-foot three with the game on the line, he’d point at his wrist: Dame Time.
He was careful to deny the charge of hero ball. “Hero ball is when you try to make it about yourself,” he said in 2015, after dragging the Blazers to a win over the Los Angeles Lakers, scoring sixteen points in the final five minutes and twelve seconds. “Or you try to take it all upon yourself.” He is still careful. In an appearance this month on J. J. Redick and Tommy Alter’s podcast, “The Old Man and the Three,” Lillard was asked about his mentality during his recent scoring spree. Before, Lillard replied, “I would always go out of my way to try to prove that I’m not trying to be on a run. So I would intentionally almost, like, pull it back.” But he had to accept that the only way for the team to win was for him to be aggressive. “It makes perfect sense for me to play this way,” he said. It was not a boast.
No one is charging Lillard with selfishness. Every story about him seems to be about competitiveness and loyalty—his desire to win, but not at the cost of undercutting his teammates or the city that has adopted him. This season, he has also seemed determined to push back against “rings culture,” the idea that the way to measure a successful career is by counting the championship rings it produced. He is having the best season of his career, averaging more than thirty points and seven assists; he is sixth in the league in usage rate, and eighth in efficiency. But the Blazers are bad, sitting thirteenth in the conference standings.
That has more than a little to do with the team’s defense: Portland’s offensive rating is tenth in the league; its defensive rating is twenty-seventh. One player can take over a game on the offensive end, but there is no such thing as a heliocentric defense (with apologies to Joel Embiid). And the Blazers’ struggles have something to do with how a team plays together, especially under pressure, no matter the quality of its stars. The Boston Celtics, for instance, are led by Jayson Tatum, who is having a near-M.V.P.-quality season but who rarely seems like the only player on the floor who matters. The overriding quality of the Celtics, at their best, is the way that they execute a plan. One player can only do so much, particularly if he’s doing it only on one end of the floor.
There are plenty of people around the N.B.A. who dislike the turn the game has taken—who find the barrage of threes boring, dislike the way defenses have been denuded, and find dominance by the few a little dull. But supernovas are dazzling, whatever they mean for a team’s over-all prospects. There is a kind of loneliness to Lillard on the court—isolation ball in its truest sense. For all his obvious connection to the city, and to his teammates, his gaze is guarded. He gives a quick flick of his jaw when he scores—a cool, lonely hero with the ball. ♦
