There are few plays in sports as exciting as a buzzer-beater in basketball. And there are few players in basketball who have hit as many buzzer-beaters as Damian Lillard.
Lillard’s late-game heroics are already the stuff of legend. There’s even a phrase for it: Dame Time. Time and again, Lillard is able to bend the last minutes of the fourth quarter to his will.
This season alone, Lillard has seven (seven!) shots that either tied the game or gave his team the lead in the final minute. And when it comes to clutch scoring (points scored in the last 5 minutes of a five-point game), he leads the league with 162 points.
Any discussion about clutch players tends to sound almost mystical: like scoring with the game on the line is possible because of some innate, unknowable energy. So credit to Paolo Uggetti at The Ringer, who dissected exactly how Lillard is able to hit those game-changing daggers.
In short: he puts in the work. Not only does Dame shoot up to 300 3-pointers at every practice, he also shoots them in every way imaginable — including with his feet planted on the floor, to improve his core strength. He also works every offseason to expand his range. “The best way to prepare for [those clutch moments] is to know that you’re giving yourself the best chance to be successful,” Lillard told The Ringer. “When it comes to the end of the game, I feel like I can lean on my training more than most people.”
Maybe putting up 300 3s — and doing so multiple times a week — isn’t doable for everybody. But what you can replicate is Lillard’s mentality on the practice court. His coach at Oakland High, Orlando Watkins, summarizes it like this: “There’s no need to be in here for three hours and only do 20 minutes of real work. Just go hard for an hour, go hard for 30 minutes, and then get up out of here, because there’s no need to fake it.”
