What the Hell Happened to Damian Lillard?

If we're already talking about disappointing first round playoff performances from typically fantastic guards, we should continue by taking a closer look at the leader of the Portland Trailblazers' floundering backcourt. Damian Lillard and (what remains of) those Blazers sulked out of FedEx Forum on Wednesday night down 2-0 and looking every bit as likely as the snakebit Raptors to be swept—a development that would even further emphasize the absurdity of the Clippers and Spurs facing off in Round 1, although that's neither here nor there. The surprising part is how this collapse has come to pass, and how big a part of it Portland's best player has been.

At this time last year, Lillard was playing like he got shot out of a fucking cannon, averaging 47% from the field and 49% from three, and adding eight trips to the line per game. He shot better from behind the 3 point line than he did overall! He earned a damn nickname. (The nickname stinks, but still.) He broke one off in Chandler Parsons so deep the poor bastard forgot which Texas team he played for.

The young fella was cold-blooded.

Right now, though, Lillard looks uncharacteristically meek and quite reasonably frustrated. His shot has abandoned him, and his already lackluster defense has regressed to comical levels. Grizzlies backup Beno Udrih had a perfectly competent year as an extended fill-in for Mike Conley, but he's looked positively Maravichian in this matchup; it takes nothing away from Udrih to note that any NBA guard would do well against Lillard's present screen-door-hanging-on-one-hinge defensive approach. Conley, for his part, has shot merely 55 percent from the floor, second among starting point guards this postseason. (It seems unfair to note that Lillard is dead last among all players in shooting percentage to this point, but I trust you knew it intuitively.)

It's easy—and, to an extent, fair—to chalk the offensive slump up to the Wes Matthews-shaped hole in the Blazers backcourt and the buzzsaw that is the Grizzlies perimeter defense. Unfortunately, it's not that simple.

Lillard's box score looks passable, but the positives pretty much end right there. Seven of his 18 points in Game 2 came in the chaos of garbage time, and that same proportion came at the free throw line, where his ailing jump shot can't hurt him. Which it did on Wednesday night, early and often.

Perhaps more importantly, those Lillard free throws are a huge proportion of the team's attempts overall in this series. Blazers not named Damian or LaMarcus have attempted just seven free throws so far, and all of them came in Game 1. Lillard has never been an assist machine on the order of Chris Paul or Steve Nash, but he is a willing passer. So far, his pass per game numbers are actually higher than they were in the regular season, but they're leading to potential points at about half the rate. None of his four assists to this point in the series have led to any free throws for his teammates; the percentage of made baskets that come from his set-ups are hovering around Aron Baynes-level, according to NBA.com.

One thing Lillard is doing a lot of, as you might hope and expect, is driving to the basket. He's among the league leaders in total drives and points on drives in the playoffs, but there's a big asterisk there. He's actually driving even more than he did in the regular season, when he was fifth overall, but his efficiency has gone in the toilet. About 68 percent of the points the Blazers have scored on those drives are coming from Lillard's shots alone, compared to just 56 percent in the regular season, again according to NBA.com. So, as the Blazers' offense becomes more and more dependent on Lillard drives, those drives become less effective at creating good opportunities for other players, which is crucial to how Terry Stotts wants his offense to work. Unless Lillard can start shooting dramatically better, that's going to be very hard for his team to overcome.

On top of that, because of how thin Portland is at guard, they've taken to playing CJ McCollum and Lillard together in what are essentially dual point guard sets. Memphis has largely countered this by rotating all-world hand-checker Tony Allen onto, uh, well, CJ McCollum. Perhaps even more surprisingly, the player tasked with stopping Lillard—the electrifying phenom who, again, was busy slamming James Harden's beard into a car door last April— has been Mike Conley. Conley may be an above-average defender at his position, but he's a bit smaller than Lillard and injured; the makeshift kickstand the Memphis training staff is stuffing in Conley's right shoe can't possibly make him feel like jumping out of the gym.

And so Conley finds himself drifting off of Lillard, into the paint, to crowd Blazers bigs and rest his gimpy hoof. Lillard doesn't make the Grizzlies pay for it, not because he won't but because he can't. Which means Memphis can gobble up LaMarcus Aldridge possessions, forcing the only shooter on the floor to take more shots than he ever has before. This is a big problem, and not just for the next few weeks.

No one but Aldridge and his agent knows what the big man is going to do this offseason, but after a hellish Game 1, anonymous teammates were whispering again about a potentially franchise-derailing defection to his home state of Texas. With Wes Mathews literally limping into free agency and fellow starters Robin Lopez and Arron Afflalo also uncertain to return, the future of the Trailblazers is troublingly murky, and the near future—that is, their prospects in these playoffs—isn't looking especially bright.

Lillard, at least, will be a part of Portland's future, and that is a good thing for them. Slumps happen, and bad match-ups are part of why it is so difficult to win in the playoffs. Lillard is young, and still a superstar; he's probably going to be very, very good for at least a little while longer. But if Lillard's not way better soon, like right now, his fellow superstar may not be quite as excited to sign that five-year extension as he was in July. There's losing, and then there's losing.