Returning to Portland after a devastating injury, the legendary point guard chases Terry Porter’s long-standing mark to cement his status as the greatest playmaker in franchise history.
Damian Lillard has the opportunity to hang an imaginary banner in the Moda Center at the end of this season. There's a version of this story that ends with his name at the top of a list that has been occupied for over three decades.
Lillard already owns the Portland Trail Blazers scoring record. He passed the legendary Clyde Drexler for that one back in December 2022, a free throw in Oklahoma City that turned into a night that the Blazers fans still remembers.
Nearly 19,400 points, more than a thousand ahead of Drexler, a gap that isn't closing anytime soon because no one is chasing it.
The other record is closer, and stranger, because it isn't what Lillard is known for.
Terry Porter has held Portland's all-time assist mark since he left the team in 1995 — 5,319 dimes dished across ten seasons of quietly excellent point guard play.
Lillard spent a decade closing in on it, passing Rod Strickland and then Drexler along the way. By the time Portland traded him to Milwaukee ahead of the 2023-24 season, he'd pulled to within 168 assists of Porter's total.
Assists racked up for the Bucks didn't count toward the Blazers' record, so that number just sat there untouched.
It's still sitting at 168 now, but for a different reason. Lillard tore his left Achilles in the 2025 playoffs, was waived by Milwaukee that summer and signed a three-year deal to return to Portland.
He sat out all of 2025-26. Lillard is 36 years old now, targeting a return at the start of the 2026-27 season, and the number hasn't moved because the games have not happened.
168 feels different from a typical countdown. It's not a matter of watching a player close a gap possession by possession over a winning season — it's tied to whether he makes it back to the floor at all.
If it happens — if he gets back on the floor in Portland red and black and plays anything like a normal season and a half — the math isn't dramatic.
Lillard averaged north of six assists a game for most of his Blazers career; even a diminished version clears 168 in well under a full season.
What is dramatic in this instance is what it means once it happens. A franchise's career scoring leader and its career assist leader are not usually the same name.
Drexler still holds the total points record runner-up, but he was never the assist man. Porter, Strickland and Lillard have occupied that list. Lillard, at 25.2 points and 6.7 assists per game across his Portland years, has the resume for it even before the record makes it official.
Porter's record has stood since 1995. It might finally fall not because Lillard chased it down, but because he refused to let his Portland story end anywhere else.
