Damian Lillard’s ‘connected’ offseason has his mind, body ready for Year 2 with Bucks (2025)

After finishing a workout in the weight room at his brother’s Portland home in early September, Houston Lillard made his way to the gym and watched as his younger brother, Damian, went through a workout on the basketball court. As Damian dropped in jumpers around the floor, Houston looked on from the side, appreciating the work his brother was putting in.

“He just came in there and watched, and I saw him sitting there just kind of like nodding his head,” Damian Lillard said during an exclusive interview with The Athletic. “He hadn’t seen me training for like two and a half months, but he saw it. And he was like, ‘This is different,’ you know? He knew I was on point.”

A few days later, Houston made a shocking admission. For the first time in his life, he admitted his younger brother — a 12-year NBA veteran, eight-time NBA All-Star and seven-time All-NBA point guard — is a better basketball player than he is. It was such a surprise to Damian that he asked Houston to say it again, so he could record it on his phone.

“My brother don’t give me credit for s—,” Damian added.

While that might seem like a big brother doing what big brothers do, Houston has been with Damian every step of the way. He was there as they grew up in Oakland. He was there sitting courtside in Portland when Damian hit the game-winner to knock the Oklahoma City Thunder out of the playoffs in 2019. And he was there last season as Damian worked through his first season with the Milwaukee Bucks. He has seen it all, which allowed Damian to use Houston’s nods of approval and admission as an unexpected reassurance of the work he put in this offseason in preparation for his second season in Milwaukee.

Traded to the Bucks a few days before training camp in 2023, Lillard was forced to adjust to a new situation on the fly. In his first season in Milwaukee, he averaged 24.3 points, 7.0 assists and 4.4 rebounds per game and made his eighth All-Star Game appearance, but the Bucks fell in a first-round upset to the Indiana Pacers as Lillard attempted to play through right Achilles tendinitis.

Lillard played in four of the Bucks’ six playoff games and 73 regular-season games, but he showed up on the injury report throughout the season with a long list of injuries, including a left ankle sprain, left adductor soreness, left hip soreness, a left oblique strain, a right adductor strain, right calf soreness, a right groin strain, a right rib contusion and the right Achilles tendinitis to end the season.

“Man, I can’t even — it’s hard to even explain, you know what I mean? That’s just the best way to put it,” Lillard said. “I didn’t get to go through my normal preparation for the season, I just didn’t. And you get a lot of confidence from that, knowing that you did all your stuff and you did everything to make sure your body can hold up and do what I need to do, to play how I play and move how I move. And I just knew that I didn’t have that.

“I still believed that I could do what I needed to do, but I just didn’t get that. … I knew that my body couldn’t be there for me the way it typically would. I had a lot more nagging stuff. I just wasn’t feeling good a lot of the time and I think that had a lot to do with it.”

Lillard admitted that, in an effort to take his mind off his divorce and the personal issues he was working through in the 2023 offseason, he tried to find things to do and new places to travel to keep himself busy.

This offseason, on the other hand, Lillard was able to do everything he wanted to prepare for this season and believes he took it further than ever. There was his much publicized workout session with David Goggins, the retired United States Navy SEAL, ultramarathon runner and public speaker. But that was just a small part of his offseason.

“I literally was just in Portland this summer,” Lillard said. “And every day, I had my meals. Monday through Friday, I was on the court at 8 a.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. I had my speed and agility coach at my house at 7 a.m. three days a week. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, it was on-court, my PT, strength and conditioning. I became so consistent with it because I wasn’t traveling, so I wasn’t having to take time away and do this and do that. … I started to feel my body get just strong and sturdy. And then in my training, I stopped getting tired.

“Then I went to go visit with Goggins for four days. And I went through that, you know, and that was like a little mental edge. … All of the parts were connected. I wasn’t just doing it on my own. Like, all right, I’m gonna go to this person, that person, they were all tied into each other. So the schedule, if I had a hard day here, it was a medium day here or it was a light day there. It was never just like beating me down, so I was never just worn out.”

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Lillard also explored sleep training for the first time.

“You go to the sleep center, and they hook you up to all these different things,” Lillard said. “They monitor your sleep. And it just helps you sleep better. You find ways to get better sleep.”

“The bed, the pillow, the temperature. And I mean, it’s not like I’m going to go to the hotel and pick out this exact temperature, but it’s like when practice is over, go get off my feet, ice, take naps. Instead of sitting there on my phone, scrolling Instagram and watching boxing on YouTube at 11 o’clock, just turn the lights off, wind down and go to sleep.”

With his body and conditioning in the right place, Lillard hopes to perform better. He hopes it not only leads to more opportunities for himself, but also better opportunities for his teammates, especially Giannis Antetokounmpo.

In their first season together, the two NBA 75th anniversary team members put together strong individual seasons but never unlocked the full potential of what many believed would be one of the league’s deadliest two-man combos.

“It’s different,” Lillard said of figuring out how to get the most out of both his game and Antetokounmpo’s game. “I think it is hard. It’s harder than people talk about it, especially when you’ve had the ball as much as he has and I’ve had the ball as much as I have.

“But I think what it comes down to is, when you are the leader of a team … like the first option of a team or like a star player, you want to make sure that you are doing what you’re supposed to do. Like, I’m being productive. I’m dominating. And you don’t ever want to feel like you’re coming up short of that.”

In Lillard’s opinion, overcoming that difficulty can be as simple as, for example, who is bringing the ball up the floor after getting a defensive stop, something that the team worked on when four-time All-Star and two-time NBA champ Rajon Rondo visited training camp in Irvine, Calif.

“What it comes down to, I think for me and Giannis is like, if I get it, he has to trust that I have his best interest in making sure that I see an opportunity for him to dominate,” Lillard said. “If he’s running up the court, I gotta advance it to him because he’s a (pain) to cover in transition. Like he’s going to get a dunk or a foul. If he runs down and it’s a mismatch because they didn’t get matched up and he got a guy ducked in under the basket, I gotta make sure he gets that.

“It’s just a matter of him trusting that. I’m also going to make sure he’s producing and he’s doing his 30 and 14 or whatever because like, it’s not that he wants stats, he wants to be his dominant self. And the same goes for me.”

Ultimately, the Bucks will need Lillard and Antetokounmpo to be at their best to put themselves in position to win a championship. And to be clear, that is what this season is all about for the Bucks. Along with four of his current Bucks teammates, Antetokounmpo won a championship in 2021, but Lillard has never had the chance to hoist the Larry O’Brien Trophy. That’s why the Bucks brought him to Milwaukee.

After Lillard put up 32.2 points and 7.3 assists per game in his final season with the Portland Trail Blazers, last season’s performance brought out more criticism of his game than before and more questions about what he can still do at 34. Pat Connaughton, his teammate in both Milwaukee and Portland, thinks that will end up being a good thing for Lillard and the Bucks this season.

“I got to see Dame for three years at the beginning of my career and earlier on in his (career), and I think he’s always carried himself with — in a positive way — a chip on his shoulder,” Connaughton said. “I think whenever people doubt him, he tends to rise to the occasion even more than the doubters thought was possible or the people who believed in him thought was possible.

“So I think the way that he’s carried himself this preseason — not just with getting himself healthy, getting himself in a position where he’s ready to go through 82 and beyond, but also the comfortability he has now in the locker room as a personality around a different group of guys in a different city — I think it’s been awesome to watch.”

Throughout his career, there have been these peaks and valleys in the public opinion of Lillard’s game. There have been moments of great respect, like being named to the NBA’s 75th anniversary team, and moments when people doubted his abilities, like the 2021-22 season where he struggled with an abdominal injury that eventually required surgery.

As he prepares to start his 13th NBA season, does Lillard believe winning a championship is the last thing he would need to do to solidify his place in history and silence naysayers?

“You would think if I won it, there would be nothing that they could say, but I think people know how f—— good I am,” Lillard said. “People know — at least the people who know what they’re watching — or I wouldn’t have been on the 75th anniversary team. If you’re talking about fans and people that are on TV just randomly saying their opinion, it’s like, ‘All right.’

“Why have I been in the West all this time and just constantly winning with a team where I’m not playing with a bunch of stars? How? How have I averaged over 30 points multiple times and I’m not doing it and f—— losing. I’m doing it, and I’m a three seed. How? How? How is my career average 25 points a game? How many people got more 60-point games than me? How many got more 50-point games than me? So I don’t think it’s a matter of how good I am; people know how good I am.”

While Lillard knows there will be naysayers, winning a championship is more about his own goals and desires than what anybody else is going to say about him. And that will continue to drive him.

“It’s just that I’m not controversial,” Lillard said. “I don’t say too much. I don’t do loud s—. I’ve never played in a major market. But I think everything that I’ve been able to accomplish in spite of those things speaks for itself. I’ve been a signature athlete for 11 years. I’ve had a shoe. I’ve been in national campaigns, global campaigns, all of these different things. I’ve been in All-Star Games, eight of them. I’ve been All-NBA seven times. I’m on the 75th (anniversary team). So, like what more (would you need)? So I don’t think it’s a matter of them not thinking I’m good enough. People have their favorites and that’s OK, but I think what I’ve done, my body of work speaks for itself.

“And if we win it, all I would do is just put the people who go back and forth in a position where it’s like, what the f— can you say? I think that’s it, but for me, I don’t think I have to prove it to nobody. This is more for myself, honestly. I just want to be like, ‘Yeah, I’ve done all of these things that I just listed to you, but I won a championship too.'”

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(Photo of Damian Lillard: Fernando Medina / NBAE via Getty Images)