Damian Lillard: Clutchest Blazer ever

...or at least the clutchest Blazer in the last 15 years. Holy hell.

The final moments of Game 6 of the 2014 playoffs between the Blazers and Rockets had a such a swing of emotions over the final 30 seconds. The iffy out-of-bounds call, the Parsons put-back with 0.9 seconds left and then, this:

"Clutch" is a tricky thing to measure, particularly vexing in an era of increasingly-advanced analytics in basketball (I should figure out a way to write about the work I did for the Blazers in some super-generic, non-contract-violating fashion. It's hardly that secretive or advanced, but was definitely interesting.), but we now know the unit of measurement: Lillards (The next, obvious questions: what does a millilillard look like? I think you could've probably measured Chandler Parsons previous put-back in millilards, or maybe some clutch free-throws. But Damian's shot — that was a full lillard.).

This is the best NBA playoffs in ages, oh my goodness. Overtimes, buzzer-beaters and game 7s galore (I should also add: removing Donald Sterling from the league. Or at least, getting the ball rolling.)

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Published on Friday, May 2nd 2014. Read this post as plain-text.