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Damian Lillard's got big, big plans: 'I want to be the MVP'

Damian Lillard is ready to face the NBA's best again this season. (Getty Images)
Damian Lillard is ready to face the NBA’s best again this season. (Getty Images)

After surprising the NBA prognosticators (ahem) who expected his team to struggle last season by leading the way to 44 wins and the second round of the playoffs, Damian Lillard has a new, even loftier goal. At least one member of the league’s most highly touted squad thinks the Portland Trail Blazers’ star point guard has the goods to achieve it, too.

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Lillard shared just how high he’s got his sights set for the 2016-17 NBA season during the Blazers’ Sunday practice, according to Kerry Eggers of the Portland Tribune:

Ask Damian Lillard a direct question, chances are you’ll get a direct answer.

I got that Sunday when I asked the Trail Blazers’ meal ticket if he sets personal goals before a season.

“I do,” Lillard said.

His goal for this season?

“MVP,” he said. “I want to be the MVP. If we come out and do the things we’re capable of doing as a team, if we win games, that means my performance will be at the level of an MVP.” […]

[Blazers coach] Terry Stotts wasn’t making any predictions, but the Portland coach endorses the idea of Lillard aspiring to become the second Trail Blazer to reign as MVP, joining Bill Walton in 1977-78.

“It’s great,” Stotts said. “Damian doesn’t run away from any challenge. He sets the bar high for himself. He sets the bar high for his team and teammates. That’s the best way to succeed and have achievement, to have those expectations.”

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Lillard’s individual expectations are very much in keeping with the collective target he set for the Blazers last week. From ESPN’s J.A. Adande:

[Lillard] has earned the right for us to store his 2016-17 expectations in the reality room. He’s neither selling his team short through artificial modesty, nor ordering law enforcement overtime pay to block off the championship parade route.

“This year I want to get to the Western Conference finals and give ourselves a chance to get to the [NBA] Finals,” Lillard said. “I think it’s possible.”

On one hand, it doesn’t seem especially crazy to envision a scenario in which a team that made the second round of the playoffs last year — especially one returning nine of its top 10 players from a year ago (vaya con dios, Gerald Henderson) and one operating in a conference that saw two top-four seeds suffer major losses this summer — making the third round of the playoffs. On the other, though, a conference finals trip would likely require a significant leap forward from a Blazers team that made its postseason push with a killer 18-4 stretch between mid-January and early March (with 12 of those 18 wins coming against non-playoff teams) but that boasted a bottom-10 defense over the course of the full season.

Steady improvement is certainly possible through continued growth from Portland’s bevy of developing contributors under the watchful eye of Stotts, whose flowing motion offense has helped create enough openings and opportunities for multiple young players (Al-Farouq Aminu, Allen Crabbe, Mo Harkless, et al.) to find their niche as NBA rotation mainstays. A leap from “pretty good” to “potentially great,” though, would only figure to come through the Blazers’ star combo of Lillard and newly maxed-out shooting guard C.J. McCollum reaching new heights as one of the NBA’s most lethal backcourts.

Lillard — who finished eighth in MVP voting last season, and who stands Portland’s unquestioned leader and top dog — recognizes that, and he’s placing the responsibility squarely on his own shoulders. He’ll need to elevate both his own all-around game (as excellent an offensive force as he is, he continues to struggle at times defensively) and his team’s ceiling to vault himself into the ranks of serious contenders, though. Only one player has ever won Most Valuable Player honors on a team that won fewer than 50 games — that’d be the late, great Moses Malone with the 46-36 Houston Rockets in 1982 — and since 2010, only four players have even cracked the top five in MVP voting on a sub-50-win squad (Kobe Bryant in 2012-13, Joakim Noah in 2013-14, and Russell Westbrook and Anthony Davis in 2014-15).

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For what it’s worth, we wouldn’t rule that leap out; we’ve got the Blazers pegged for a 50-plus-win campaign and a top-four seed in the West this season. And, from the sounds of things, neither would Steve Kerr.

Yes, the Golden State Warriors head coach enters the 2016-17 season leading a roster that features the players who have won the last three NBA MVP awards — reigning back-to-back honoree Stephen Curry, and 2013-14 winner Kevin Durant, who, in case you missed it, is on the Warriors now — and yes, he (and everybody else) expects the Warriors to have a bounce-back season for the ages after falling to the Cleveland Cavaliers in the 2016 NBA Finals. When it comes to the MVP race, though, Kerr said this weekend that he can foresee a scenario in which his two top guns split the ballot, making room for another candidate to swoop in for the win — a scenario he detailed using a somewhat convoluted political analogy, according to Sam Amick of USA TODAY Sports:

“I think KD is kind of like [presidential candidate] Gary Johnson,” Kerr bemused. “You know, he’s like the third party guy. He’s going to come in and take a few votes from Steph, take a few from [the Cleveland Cavaliers’] LeBron [James]. Steph might be Ralph Nader [who was a third party presidential spoiler in 2000], like he takes some votes from KD, takes some from LeBron. And then Damian Lillard wins the election, so that’s my forecast.”

Which begged the question: who is Donald Trump?

“Which one’s Trump?” Kerr replied with a smile. “I’m not answering that. Nobody on our team.”

While we try to wrap our minds around the image of Dame Dolla as this NBA season’s Hillary Clinton, Lillard and his teammates will continue to work on their ground game — the hard, meticulous, detail-rich work of refining coverages, reinforcing communication and building chemistry — in hopes of climbing up to the ranks of the NBA’s elite this season.

“Last year, there was a lot more … I don’t know, uncertainty, I guess,” Lillard told Eggers. “A little bit more nerves. … just kind of wondering how the season would go. We weren’t as comfortable as we are right now. We didn’t have the same understanding of each other the way we do now. We really believe in each other now.”

And with every new sky-high goal Lillard sets, it becomes more and more clear where that confidence and self-belief come from.

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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!

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