Damian Lillard's Return Was a Rout

Damian Lillard's Return Was a Rout: 25 Points, a 21-0 Start and a Suns Team Buried by Halftime

Sports / Eighteen months after he last played a regular-season game, and more than three and a half years after he last wore a Portland uniform, Damian Lillard needed less than four minutes to turn opening night into a homecoming party. The Trail Blazers scored the game's first 21 points, led by 31 after one quarter and beat the Phoenix Suns 124-83 — and the most important number of the night was not the margin. It was 24: the minutes Lillard played, none of them in the fourth quarter, because he did not need to.

The Damian Lillard return could hardly have been scripted better. Lillard scored 25 points, made six 3-pointers and handed out six assists in 24 minutes as the Portland Trail Blazers dismantled the visiting Phoenix Suns 124-83 in the season opener for both teams at Moda Center on Wednesday night, October 21. It was Lillard's first regular-season game in nearly 18 months — his previous one came on March 18, 2025 — his first appearance in a Portland uniform in more than three and a half years, and the Blazers' third-largest margin of victory in a season opener in franchise history. Portland opened the game with 21 consecutive points and led by as many as 52.

Damian Lillard return — Lillard in a Portland Trail Blazers uniform during his first stint with the team — Damian Lillard in a Portland uniform during his first stint with the Trail Blazers, 2012-23. On Wednesday he played his first game for the club in more than three and a half years — and his first anywhere in nearly 18 months, after tearing his left Achilles tendon in the 2025 postseason. Photo: Erik Drost, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (file photo).

Twenty-one to nothing: how the game ended in the first quarter

Season openers are supposed to be feeling-out exercises. This one was over before Phoenix scored. Donovan Clingan opened the game with a 3-pointer, Deni Avdija followed with a jumper, and Ja Morant, Avdija and Lillard each connected from deep as Portland ran out to 14-0 inside the first 3:18. The lead reached 21-0 on Avdija's free throws just before the midway point of the quarter. Phoenix's first points came on two Devin Booker free throws with 5:54 left in the period, and the Suns missed their first 10 shots from the field before Oso Ighodaro's dunk with 4:27 remaining made it 25-6. By then Booker and Morant had already exchanged words and matching technical fouls, at 6:36 of the first — the only fight Phoenix showed all night.

Lillard then supplied the sequence the crowd had waited three and a half years for: two 3-pointers in a 16-second span late in the quarter, the second stretching the lead to 38-8, before Scoot Henderson buried Portland's eighth 3 of the quarter for a 43-12 lead after one. Portland made four 3-pointers in the first 3:18 and shot the Suns off the floor with pace Phoenix never matched. The second quarter was merely bad for Phoenix rather than catastrophic — Toumani Camara scored 11 of his 18 points in it, nine on 3-pointers — and the halftime score was 72-39. Avdija scored seven points in the first three minutes of the third, Lillard's step-back 3 late in the period made it 107-66, and Yang Hansen's bank shot with 3:38 to play pushed the lead to its peak at 122-70. The fourth quarter was a formality played by reserves.

The numbers, in context

Lillard's line deserves to be read slowly: 25 points on 7-of-12 shooting, 6-of-10 from 3-point range, 5-of-5 at the line, six assists, in 24 minutes — a year and a half removed from his last regular-season game and from a torn left Achilles tendon, an injury that has ended or diminished the careers of guards far younger than 36. He scored 12 points in the first quarter alone. Around him, the new-look Blazers were balanced to the point of cruelty: Avdija, a game-time decision with a right ankle injury, had 18 points and 10 rebounds; Camara matched him with 18; Henderson added 15 off the bench; Clingan scored 11; and Morant, on his Blazers debut after arriving from Memphis, registered 14 points and eight assists. Portland won the rebounding battle 56-39, shot 47.9 percent overall and hit 19 of 47 3-pointers (40.4 percent).

Phoenix's numbers read like a warning label. The Suns shot 35.7 percent from the field and 6 of 31 (19.4 percent) from 3. Booker, beginning his 12th season with the franchise, led them with 23 points but finished a staggering minus-43 — meaning Portland outscored Phoenix by 43 points across his minutes in a game lost by 41. Dillon Brooks and Jalen Green added 10 points apiece, and no other Sun reached double figures in the reporting available at the final buzzer. The 21-0 start, per BVM Sports' game notes, was the NBA's largest opening-game run in 25 seasons. One game is one game — but a 41-point opening-night loss, in which the opponent's returning star never has to play the fourth quarter, is the kind of result that follows a team for weeks.

Moda Center in Portland, where the Trail Blazers beat the Suns 124-83 in the season opener — Moda Center in Portland, where a sellout crowd watched Lillard's first home game for the Blazers since March 2023. The arena has lived through every chapter of his Portland career — the rise, the 2023 departure, and now the return. Photo: Michael Barera, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (file photo).

Why this matters

The basketball significance starts with the Achilles. Guards who tear an Achilles in their mid-30s historically return as lesser versions of themselves, because the injury steals the first step that everything else depends on. Lillard's game, however, was never built on the first step alone: it is built on range. A guard who must be guarded 30 feet from the basket bends a defense before he dribbles, and on Wednesday that gravity was visibly intact — six made 3s, several from well beyond the line, and a Phoenix defense stretched so thin that Avdija, Camara and Morant played in space all night. Twenty-four efficient minutes in October prove nothing about March. But the specific skill Phoenix could not guard is the one least dependent on the tendon he tore, and that is the encouraging part for Portland.

The second story is what Lillard returned to. He rejoined the Blazers in the summer of 2025 and spent all of last season rehabilitating while a young Portland team snapped a five-year postseason drought without him. This is not the franchise he left in 2023, and it is not being coached by the man who started last season either: Micah Nori, hired off Minnesota's staff, now leads a group whose previous coach, Tiago Splitter — himself an interim appointment after Chauncey Billups' arrest in an alleged gambling scheme — departed for the Chicago Bulls, as the Associated Press reported in its game coverage. Morant's arrival from Memphis, in the trade that sent Jerami Grant and Kris Murray the other way, gives Portland something it has never had beside Lillard: a second guard who can collapse a defense on his own. The Morant-Lillard pairing will be attacked defensively all season, and one rout of a disorganized Phoenix team does not answer that question. It does establish the ceiling: when both guards are bending a defense at once, Portland's shooters get the cleanest looks in the building.

For Phoenix, the concern is structural rather than emotional. A team can survive a bad shooting night; it cannot easily survive the combination on display Wednesday — no rim protection resistance early, no second scorer behind Booker, and a bench already thinned by injury (see below) on the first night of an 82-game season. The Suns never led. They trailed by 31 after 12 minutes. Openers produce flukes, and Phoenix's shooting line (19.4 percent from 3) will regress on its own. What will not regress automatically is the defensive disorganization that let a team score on its first nine meaningful possessions. That is the film Phoenix's coaches will be living in until Saturday.

The Suns' other problem: the injury list grew on night one

Phoenix arrived short-handed and left shorter. Big man Oso Ighodaro, who had scored eight points on 4-of-7 shooting, exited in the first half grabbing at his right hip and did not return; Suns coach Jordan Ott confirmed the injury was to the right hip, the same one whose soreness had kept Ighodaro out of the final preseason game, and he was not on the bench when the second half began. Guard Luke Kennard was downgraded from questionable to out before tip-off with left knee tendinopathy, and 7-footer Mark Williams — expected to anchor the middle — is out following shoulder surgery and is expected to miss multiple months. In a Western Conference where the margin between the play-in and the lottery is a handful of games, an opener that costs a rotation big man while two more sit is a worse outcome than the 41 points.

Devin Booker, who led the Phoenix Suns with 23 points in the 124-83 loss at Portland — Devin Booker, pictured with Team USA at the Paris 2024 Olympics. Booker led Phoenix with 23 points on Wednesday but finished minus-43, as the Suns missed their first 10 shots and never recovered from Portland's 21-0 start. Photo: Clément Bardot, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons (file photo).

What happens next

Portland (1-0) visits the Sacramento Kings on Friday, the first real test of whether the 21-0 chemistry survives a road crowd and a scouting report. The early questions are already clear: how Nori manages Lillard's minutes across back-to-backs after an Achilles tear, whether the Morant-Lillard backcourt can guard anyone, and whether Wednesday's 40 percent team 3-point shooting is a rotation's true level or an opening-night mirage against a team that stopped competing by the second quarter. Phoenix (0-1) goes home for its opener on Saturday against the Golden State Warriors at Mortgage Matchup Center, with Ighodaro's hip the first item on the injury report and a fan base that has just watched the worst possible version of night one. Neither team's season will be decided this week. But Portland now has proof of concept for the most sentimental roster move in the league, and Phoenix has a 41-point problem to explain. Only one of those is a good place to start.