Nylon Calculus: Damian Lillard and a history of playoff highs and lows

Damian Lillard has one of the most impressive individual postseason resumes in NBA history. Just don’t look at his team’s results.

Damian Lillard is a future Hall-of-Famer — on that point, there should be no doubt. And while his historic resume is propped up by remarkable regular-season numbers, he’s had his playoff moments too. He holds the record for most 3-pointers made in a single playoff game and his 55-point, 10-assist performance in Game 5 was arguably the best statistical performance in playoff history. He also has, not just one but two walk-off, series-winning 3-pointers.

Unfortunately, his playoff resume is built primarily on moments as opposed to extended success. This season’s loss to the Denver Nuggets was the fifth time his team has been bounced in the first round. His seasons have twice ended in the Western Conference Semis and once in the Western Conference Finals. With his 31st birthday rapidly approaching, he has yet to appear in the NBA Finals.

However, we should be absolutely clear that his lack of postseason success has very little to do with his own performance. In this season’s six-game loss to the Nuggets, he averaged 34.3 points, 10.2 assists and 4.3 rebounds per game on a 66.0 true shooting percentage. He is one of just three players since 1973 to have played at least 50 postseason games with averages of at least 25.0 points and 6.0 assists — the other two are Stephen Curry and LeBron James.

I don’t want to spend time extolling the various failings of his different supporting casts over the years but it’s worth pointing out just how much of a tragic outlier his lack of postseason success is for such an accomplished player.

How does Damian Lillard’s playoff record compare to other Hall-of-Famers?

Basketball-Reference has a model which calculates Hall-of-Fame probability for both active and retired players (that is to say the percentage is calculated retroactively for players who have already been inducted). It’s not a perfect picture of a player’s career accomplishments but it’s a reasonable approximation.

Lillard currently ranks 83rd among active and retired players, with a Hall-of-Fame probability of 90.6 percent, falling directly between James Worthy and Grant Hill. At this level, the exact percentage is largely irrelevant to his actual odds. Larry Foust, a center who played from 1950-1962, is the only eligible player with odds of 80 percent or higher according to the model who has not actually made the hall. But these odds are useful for classifying a tier of players against whom to compare Lillard’s relative playoff success.

To quantify that second aspect, I simply went through the top 100 active and retired players in Hall-of-Fame probability and awarded them points for appearances in each playoff round. Considering, qualitatively, advancing through each round to be exponentially harder, I awarded 1 point for a first-round playoff appearance, 2 points for a second-round playoff appearance, 3 points for a third-round playoff appearance and 4 points for a fourth-round playoff appearance. For earlier eras, when the playoffs had fewer than four rounds, I kept the same structure, for example awarding Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 4 points for the Lakers’ appearance in the 1980 NBA Finals. This depresses the point total for players of earlier eras but I think this is fair considering, the added challenge of making it through an additional round of competition.

I didn’t award any extra points for actually winning a championship since that was a variable in the Basketball-Reference model. However, there is still some collinearity since you have to actually make the Finals to win a championship.

Of players on my list, LeBron James unsurprisingly came out on top with 91 Playoff Points. Lillard ranked 92nd, with just 13 points. The graph below compares the 100-player sample by Playoff Points and Hall-of-Fame probability.

You can see Damian Lillard down in the same general region as Dave Bing (who made the playoffs just five times in 12 seasons), Grant Hill (who essentially missed four seasons in his prime) and Alex English (who peaked in a season of absurdly uptempo games, juicing the box score portion of his Hall-of-Fame resume).

If things continue, at some point, Lillard will start to be included in the conversation with players like John Stockton, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley — the greatest in NBA history who never won a championship. He may deserve mentioning in that group for his individual accomplishments but in terms of lack of playoff success, he’s on a tier by himself. Stockton, Malone and Barkley have six NBA Finals appearances between them. Stockton and Malone also each made another three Conference Finals, Barkley has two. Lillard is closer to Chris Paul, who has made just one Conference Finals appearance but even Paul has made seven appearances in the Conference semis (including this season) to Lillard’s three.

Again, none of this is meant to disparage Lillard, he is an exceptional player who has risen to the playoff challenge time and again, only to be beaten by superior teams. It’s not clear what the future holds for him or the Portland Trail Blazers but whatever this offseason brings, it’s clear he deserves more. Here’s hoping he gets it, and an opportunity to bring Dame Time deeper into the NBA Playoffs.