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Damian Lillard is a superstar and in Game 7, the Denver Nuggets defended him accordingly. They did not give CJ McCollum the same respect and it cost them. McCollum scored 37 points on Sunday and the Portland Trail Blazers are now heading to the Western Conference final after a 100-96 win in Denver.
Portland will face the Golden State Warriors.
The first match is scheduled for Tuesday in Oakland.
Many people will quickly reject Portland's chances of beating or even threatening the Warriors, but there are three reasons why this is a stupid assumption. First, the Warriors could be without Kevin Durant until maybe as late as the fifth game in this series. Two, Lillard is a star. And third, McCollum too. I repeat it because it deserves to be repeated. McCollum is neither a sidekick nor a winger. McCollum is a star, an absolutely indefensible individual force who can and absolutely wants to bear the burden of putting a team on his back and leading it through the greatest moments of the biggest games.
He did everything in series.
He did it again in the seventh game.
While Lillard was under Steph Curry's treatment, two defenders pursued him and trapped him to a distance of 35 feet while holding him without scoring before the six-minute mark of the second quarter, it was McCollum who took advantage of A slightly more forgiving defense. Be careful to mark each bucket after bucket, each feeling absolutely necessary to keep the Blazers alive while Denver, who had a lead of 17 in the first period, was about to flee.
That's not to say that McCollum was being defensively followed. It was. The guys get up in him, as they should. Everyone knows that he is one of the best scorers in the league. But that's it: he often plays one against one. It's a benefit to play alongside Lillard. That's the same reason why Kevin Durant sees a much more unique coverage than a player of his caliber should ever receive, because Steph Curry is doubled and stuck so often.
Look here while McCollum goes to the end:
Notice, first of all, how Gary Harris stays under the screen and that McCollum has all the time he wants to let Enes Kanter put his screen back on screen without a second defender coming in. Lillard does not have that luxury. Second, look at how far Nikola Jokic is the second defender. He fell all the way down the path instead of taking McCollum out of the screen, and now, when McCollum crosses the turn, he now has an unobstructed track for descent at full speed. He'll have this bucket every time.
You can not really blame the Nuggets for this kind of cover on McCollum. You have to focus on Lillard, and it's hard to give that kind of attention to two players so far from the hoop. That's what makes Blazers dangerous. They have two stars, both of which belong to the most elite category of individual scorers.
"Everyone can see the qualifications face to face," Pelicans assistant coach Darren Erman recently told CBS Sports. "It is [McCollum] Such a manufacturer of creative moves, the handles of entry and exit, it can turn any defender. But you know something else in which he is really talented and that allows him to shoot himself so easily? He keeps the guys on his hip as effectively as anyone. It is difficult to confront him as a defender. He's really good at using his body to keep the defenders where he wants to, then to get to his places, and then the skills take over. In my opinion, he is one of the best players in the league. I even said [Blazers GM] Neil Olshey is one of the first times I saw him play. He uses his body so well in tight spaces. This is not something that people talk to enough about him. "
What is crazy is that McCollum has never been a star player. That's how ridiculous the West is, why he and Lillard never got the credit they deserved as a duo. Everyone loves to tell how New Orleans swept the country last year and never made it to the final phase of the conference. But listen, when you are in the era of the Western Conference, you are among the top five. seed six of the last seven years, and one of the first three seeds of the last two years, you work. Finally, we're going to talk about McCollum and Lillard as an exciting backyard that probably will not make any sense in the end.
They are in the final phase of the Western Conference.
Without Jusuf Nurkic.
The second Nurkic fell, everyone wrote the Blazers. Well, almost everyone. Yours sincerely chose them to do exactly where they did it, but I mislead. The first reason people thought the Blazers had been made, was that they failed to assign an appropriate weight to Lillard's size. Beyond that, no one saw McCollum more than a strong winger. These playoffs, and certainly this game 7 performance, put that in bed.
McCollum not only scored 37 points on Sunday, but he was 17 shots out of 29. He also made one of the games of the game with this block of pursuit with the Blazers hanging at a four-point lead with less than five minutes to play:
At this time of the year, you really discover who the fighters are. Who will compete and return to the image to make a play of this kind. Because, let's be honest, there are players with much bigger names, who are considered much better players, who did not show up for their teams in the biggest moments of these playoffs.
As usual, McCollum has spent most of his game playing or dying, mingling casually with some of the toughest shots imaginable. Floats. Fade-aways. Runners. Contested pull-ups. And when everything was on the line, the Blazers got up and needed a bucket to seal the match. It's not Lillard they cleaned up and where they went. It was McCollum.
There is so much credit for this move. Lillard for having the superstar humility to retire happily when his co-star wants it. Terry Stotts takes the ball from the hands of his best player at the greatest moment. But most of the time, it's just McCollum coming on the road, leaving no room for error and barely enough margin to make a hit, and sticking it all the way. McCollum has been very good throughout the playoffs. Frankly, he's been so good for years. Sunday was only punctuation, even if this Blazers race is not over.
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