 I can't be the only one that's tired of this Damia Lillard situation. It has nothing to do with the person, the player, the man that is Damia Lillard, but about this cloud that's hovering above him, the trailblazers, the Miami Heat, and the rest of the NBA. We're a couple weeks away from media day and training camp and there's not a lot to talk about. The only thing that's going on across the league is the outstanding trade request from Damia Lillard and James Harden. So if you want people to click on your video, on your article, talk about one of those two things. Yes, I understand the irony in it. I'm talking about the clicks of the Damia Lillard video as I'm filming a Damia Lillard video, but I'm doing that differently. This man Damia Lillard requested a trade about two months ago and we're still twiddling our thumbs trying to figure out will he play for the blazers? Will he play for the Heat? Is there a mystery team out there? But as of right now, he's a blazer. And there's a reason for that. When Damia Lillard requested a trade, he gave the Portland Trailblazers a short list of teams that he would like to go to. This is not a new practice for NBA players. It happens all the time, especially when a star player requests a trade. The only difference is usually that list is three teams to five teams. Damia Lillard said, Hey, it's Miami or nothing. He is so on Miami that this man is reposting things on Instagram of people calling him a future Miami Heat. And he's cool with it for about 17 minutes. And then he takes it down. But for 17 minutes, that's up. When you have a player with a short list of one team, it makes things 10 times more difficult. Because the Miami Heat are 100% interested in Damian Lillard. This is a team that has been to multiple NBA finals, multiple conference finals over the last couple of years. You look at their roster and you think, if they just had a Damian Lillard, they would have an additional championship. So they're interested. Problem is the trade packets that they have, it's not as good as the Trailblazers want. You got to remember that the Portland Trailblazers are potentially trading the best player in their franchise history. No Lord than the second best player in their franchise history. You're trying to explain to them that he's worth title here. We're on a couple first round picks in 2028. The Blazers, it's not enough. And that's how we get to the point right now where we got this stalemate where everybody's looking at each other, waiting for something to happen. I would deem myself a Damian Lillard fan, not a super fan, like some people I know. But I had grown to become a Damian Lillard fan for the first reason is he's a demon on the court. The brother dropped 71 points in an NBA game early this season and made it look extremely, extremely easy. But deeper than that, I was a fan of Damian Lillard's branding and mindset, not running from the grind had been so much of Damian Lillard that it became a meme that people said, no day, maybe you should run away from the grind because you not running is resulting in first round exit, second round exit, and so on and so forth. And the reason that resonated with me is you don't get a ton of star level players and smaller markets that are willing to spend their entire career with one team. And until he actually requested the trade a few months ago, I was under the assumption that Damian Lillard was going to be one of those few one team guys. Look at the top players in 2023 majority of them, a great majority of them have already been on multiple teams in their career. And a few players that haven't changed teams that are really, really good are either really young like a Lucca Dodgers or they have a championship. Steph Curry, Warriors for Life, probably multiple championships. Nicolae Oakage got his first NBA championship this season and he might add a couple more. Seems like a guy that might be a one team guy. And then Yanis, I was feeling the same way, but that man Yanis has been yapping a little bit this offseason. So we don't really know what the future of Yanis looks like, but the top players that are one team guys typically have a championship under their belt and Dame doesn't have that. I say typically because Jordan B still don't got one. He might also be on the trade block zone, but that's another video. I hate the way we gauge player success rating in the NBA. It's all ring based. If you have zero rings, were you really a winner? And I think in a vacuum, you can look at it that way. But there are so many different factors to win in the championship that I can undoubtedly say that Damian Lillard is a winner, though he's never even touched an NBA finals floor. What do you mean? He has been a stellar performer in the playoffs as long as you exclude the one series against the Pelicans were Drew Holiday, Rizan Rondo and Anthony Davis upset them. That was one of my favorite series a couple of years ago. But other than that, this man has been nothing but great come playoff time. He's been so great that he's got two of the most iconic playoff game winners ever, ever. I was going to say this decade, the last two decades, but like ever the game winner when he was young against the Houston Rockets, legendary, waving Paul George off legendary. And he's done that time and time again. And I don't want to get past the fact that he has a conference finals appearance when the Western conference was as deep as it possibly could be. And they went into that series and I don't know a single person outside of Portland that picked them to win it. I mean, it was not even really close. But still, that team could could have potentially been enough to win it, but been playing in the wrong era in the wrong season, whatever you want to call it, he has that there are a lot of great NBA players that have never graced a conference finals and he's done that in Portland. So when he officially requests this trade, I didn't feel like he was forgetting about his branding of running from the grind and so on and so forth because it's been a decade of this and he deserves better, but better can be multiple things. Better doesn't just mean the Miami Heat. This is a classic case of having your cake and eating it too or trying to make that the case. Because I have no doubt in my mind that if Damien Lillard was open to going to some of these other teams that they'd have a better offer for. Again, I mentioned earlier that if you want clicks, talk about Damien Lillard and I feel like in the last 72 hours, there have been so many reports around him that it's hard to differentiate what is fact and what is fiction. The first one is that if another team outside of the Miami Heat ended up pulling off the trade for Damien Lillard that he would not even report to training camp. Whoa. And that's coming from Shamsherania, who's one of the two most trusted sources in all of basketball reporting that. And I got to pray that this is just a leverage pull from Damien Lillard in his camp because this dramatically changes the way he is viewed as an NBA player across the landscape of fandom. I think most people recognize that Damien Lillard is a damn good basketball player. I think most people respect the fact that Damien Lillard was willing to stay on the organization for a decade, even though they had struggled to put real talent around him. But if he got traded to another team that's not the Miami Heat and he decided, no, I don't I don't want to do this. All of not all of a good chunk of that respect is thrown out the window for NBA fans. Again, I'm just hoping that it's a leverage play looking at the other 28 teams around the league said, don't you dare trade for me because I might not report. But he don't mean it. Hopefully it's leverage. That's that's all I can hope another report in the last 72 hours that if you are one of the other 28 teams that trade with him that's not named the Miami Heat, he's just going to immediately request a trade in the first chance he gets again. Is it fact? Is it cap? We don't know. But that's the that's the world we're living in right now. And having one team on the list of teams you want to be traded to, it's not foreign. It just doesn't happen often. Look, Kevin Arant told us last off season he wants to play for the Phoenix Suns and it took six months. But he finally got there. James Harder said, I want to play for the Brooklyn Nets and he got traded to Brooklyn and he said I want to play for the Philadelphia 76s and he got traded to the 76s and now he said I want to play for the Clippers. I don't know if that's going to come a reality, but again, when you are this caliber player, sometimes it does work out, but everything just becomes way more difficult when it is just one team. And when Kevin said I want to go play for the Phoenix Suns, the Brooklyn Nets didn't just hand him away for a bad package. They got McKell Bridges, Cam Johnson and all of the draft capital for like the next seven years. The Miami Heat don't have the type of trade packs for Damien Lillard. And I'm not even saying that Damien Lillard is worthy of that kind of trade package, but remember the Troubles are trading one of the two best players in their franchise history in their mind. They think he's worth that because that's all they know. Telling me Rudy Gobert got traded for five first round picks and the Miami Heat are offering to stop it. The next rumor is that there is another Eastern Conference team in the mix, ladies and gentlemen. Who could it be? Some people speculate that it might be the 76 because again, they're dealing with the James Harden stuff. Some people speculate it might be the Toronto Raptors. Yeah, that's a team that could use them and others speculate that it's the Chicago Bulls, that the Chicago Bulls are the team that is secretly trying to get in on Damien Lillard. And listen, I don't know this guy. I'm not discrediting anyone. I just I just can't see. I just can't see it being a fact. But someone said it. So now it's going viral on Twitter and everyone must talk about the fact that the Bulls might be in on Dane, which is one of the most unlikely scenarios in my opinion. Now, if it did happen, welcome to Chicago. Welcome to Chicago, Damien. But it's unlikely in the timing of all of this is crazy because Damien Lillard just released his fifth studio album. How do you get to five albums? I have no idea. Shout out to Damien. I haven't listened. So I can't say if it's good or bad. But when any artist drops an album they go on a media run. And Damien Lillard is currently on that. And every single interview he does, they spend the first seven minutes talking about the album. And then the rest of the interview is like, Hey, what was the moment that you decided that you wanted to request to train? They're not even talking about the music no more. And Damien Lillard being the person that he is, he's answering every single question because that's just his brand. That's just who he is. And some of them come off worse. Some answers come off bad. So here we are a few weeks away from training camp. And we're going to see what happens. I think things are changing dramatically. And maybe before this video is even up, he's traded, but the rumors, the speculation, the sources of it all has just made it insufferable that I just needed to happen so it can be done. You know what else has been bothering me lately?