How will Damian Lillard perform as Portland’s main offensive star?

I’ve said it time and time again[Ed. Where are these sayings of things, Jacob?]: The Portland Trailblazers are one of the most fascinating teams to me this season. They won’t be very good, that’s for sure. But they’ll be fascinating. They were a legitimate very good team the past few seasons, but always were snake-bitten in the second half from massive injuries. Although the Blazers’ ceiling might have been limited if everyone returned, the team would have again been a 50-plus win contender in the cutthroat Western Conference.

Of course, that’s not how things turned out this offseason. Gone are All-Star LaMarcus Aldridge, underrated center Robin Lopez, do-it-all Nicolas Batum, and the team’s heart and soul Wesley Matthews. They’re rebuilding with a Boston Celtics-like approach: Take a gamble on as many first-round picks as possible and hope that a few of them stick around for the long haul. One difference, obviously, is that Portland already has a known All-Star entity in Damian Lillard.

Lillard, who turned 25 in July, has been oft-criticized since he entered the league. He came from small-school Weber State, so many felt he had high bust potential. He was old for a rookie, as he’s 21 months older than Kyrie Irving, who was drafted a year earlier. His defense has been subpar on many occasions. He’s gotten the All-Star nods, but many feel his rival Mike Conley is better overall. And Lillard struggled relatively from three-point range last season.

Now that Aldridge, the team’s unquestioned offensive centerpiece, is gone from the equation, how will Lillard perform this year? He’ll have undoubtedly more defensive attention zeroed in on him. Nowadays, the debate for Portland’s second-best offensive player is a sad state of affairs deciding between Gerald Henderson, C.J. McCollum, Allan Crabbe, Mason Plumlee, and (hilariously, the 50-40-90 fan favorite) Meyers Leonard. It’s a bleak forecast.

At first glance, it would seem Lillard has a shot at the league’s highest Usage Rate. Portland might have the largest talent gap between a team’s first- and second-best player. So I thought it would be worthwhile to investigate how the Oakland native Lillard performed without Aldridge throughout his career. The results – with a decent sample size of over 2,600 minutes, nearly one full NBA season – might show a glimpse of the stats he could produce in 2015-16.

The most interesting stat from the image above is more likely about Aldridge. During the past three years together, Aldridge actually had a better True Shooting Percentage without Lillard on the court. That’s despite the to-be-expected increase in Usage Rate. And the efficiency difference – 51.4 percent with, 55.1 percent without – isn’t all that miniscule. Not sure exactly what that means. But it’s hard to see Aldridge getting anything close to 30 percent usage in San Antonio.

On the Lillard front, his shooting efficiency took a brief expected fall amid his large increase in Usage Rate sans Aldridge. The NBA’s league leader in usage last season was Russell Westbrook with an astonishing 38.4 percent. Next up were Dwyane Wade at 34.7, DeMarcus Cousins at 34.1, and LeBron James at 32.3. Lillard – thanks to the returns of Kevin Durant and Chris Bosh, along with being without the contributions of Lopez, Batum, or Matthews – should be expected to finish right around the top-three this season.

The with/without statistics are somewhat crude. But considering Lillard has averaged 36.7 minutes per game in his career, and looking at the sans-Aldridge stats are the easiest existing metric for comparison, this is a still worthwhile exercise as a starting point. Averages of 23-4-6 might be a bit of an underestimate, in the end. It’s still a solid guess for where Lillard might be as the lone wolf for the first time in his young NBA career. The Blazers were surely need every point he can contribute.