Damian Lillard torches Jazz with career-high, franchise-record 59 points

Damian Lillard made it very clear very early on Saturday that he intended to seize control of the Portland Trail Blazers’ playoff destiny with both hands. After assisting on Portland’s first bucket against the visiting Utah Jazz, a 3-pointer by center Meyers Leonard and watching running buddy C.J. McCollum hit a short floater, Dame went on to score the Blazers’ next 22 points, staking Portland to a 16-point lead with just under four minutes left in the opening quarter.

At that point, the only question was just how crooked a number the Blazers’ explosive point guard could put up. How does “the most points in the history of the franchise” grab you?

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Lillard absolutely incinerated the Jazz on Saturday, finishing with a franchise-best 59 points to lead Portland to a 101-86 victory. The win improved the Blazers to 40-40 and gave them a 1 1/2-game lead over the Denver Nuggets in the race for the eighth and final playoff spot in the Western Conference with two games remaining in their season.

One more Blazers win, against either the San Antonio Spurs on Monday or the New Orleans Pelicans on Wednesday, punches Portland’s postseason ticket. So does one more Nuggets loss, since the Blazers clinched the head-to-head season series with Denver late last month.

Lillard made 18 of his 34 field-goal attempts, including a career-high-tying nine 3-pointers in 14 tries, in 42 minutes of burn. Dame turned in the third-highest single-game point total of the 2016-17 season, trailing only Devin Booker’s 70-point explosion last month and Klay Thompson’s 60-points-in-three-quarters firestorm in December.

He outscored the entire Jazz starting five on Saturday — and handily:

Lillard also added six rebounds, five assists, one steal and zero turnovers in his 42 minutes of work. Portland has now won eight of their last 10, and 16 of 21 since the beginning of March to surge into the lead in the race for the eighth seed.

Gordon Hayward had 21 points to lead the way for the Jazz, who fell into the No. 5 spot in the West behind the Los Angeles Clippers, who beat the San Antonio Spurs on Saturday. Both the Clips and Jazz have 49-31 records, but L.A. owns the head-to-head tiebreaker over Utah. As it stands, the Clippers would hold home-court advantage over the Jazz in a 4-vs.-5 opening-round matchup.

What’s wild: with a couple of breaks, Lillard could’ve topped the 60-point mark himself. After dropping 26 in the opening frame, he went scoreless in six second-quarter minutes, missing a layup and the kind of pull-up 3 on which he’s torched so many defenses over the last few years.

And then, after drawing a foul on Utah’s Joe Ingles while in the act of shooting a 3-pointer with 23 seconds left, Lillard — an 89.6 percent free-throw shooter, who had gone 13-for-13 from the charity stripe to that point, and who stepped to the line with 58 on the ledger — missed his first two freebies.

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Oh, well. He’ll just have to make his peace with the best scoring night in the history of the Blazers organization. And with logging his third career 50-point game and becoming the all-time-record 10th player to hit the half-century-mark in the NBA this season. And with coming up unbelievably big in the highest-leverage moment of his team’s season to put Portland on the cusp of a return to the playoffs.

We suspect he’ll find a way to get right with that.

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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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