Damian Lillard sat, waiting, in one of the many conference rooms that could be found in the office building where the Blazers' front office was located. He had a meeting scheduled with Neil Olshey, the Blazers' general manager, and he wasn't looking forward to it. His previous encounters with the executive had been...strange, to put it mildly.
"Sorry I'm late!" Neil apologized, rushing into the room looking harried. "Busy with the restart, you know."
"I can imagine," Damian said.
Neil had a disorganized stack of papers with him and was spreading them all over the conference room table. Some of them were clearly not related to his duties as the GM of a basketball team. There was a menu for a local pizza place and some insurance paperwork for his boat. "Always working the phones, trying to figure out if there's that one piece we can get that will put us over the top," he went on as he shuffled through his documents.
"Gotta do what you gotta do," Damian replied. He hoped that, by keeping his replies short, they could quickly finish whatever business they had together.
Neil was still sorting through the disorderly mass of papers. His very hard breathing was unnerving to Damian. "But I need your help."
Damian remembered the last time he had been "volunteered" to "help" Neil. That occasion involved a cross-country road-trip and a botched attempt to abduct LaMarcus Aldridge. "I can help recruit if you need me to," he offered, dreading whatever was next going to come out of Neil's mouth. "We missed out on JR Smith, but you just know Luke Babbitt wants to come back and be a Blazer again."
The sought-after paper had been located. Neil proudly held up the black-and-white printout of a very familiar face. "I need you to get LaMarcus back."
The conference room was quiet for a while. Neil was smiling broadly, but that smile faded when Damian didn't immediately react to the idea with enthusiasm. "You remember LaMarcus, right?" he asked his player.
"I do," Damian replied cautiously. "But he plays for the Spurs. He can't just play for us instead."
Neil's face had gone strangely blank. In Damian's experience, that was never a positive sign. "The Spurs?" Neil finally said in a flat tone of voice. "No. LaMarcus is a Blazer for life. He told me that. We had a very, very special and close relationship." Neil seemed to retreat into his memories at this point, and didn't react at all when Damian brought up a box-score on his phone and waved it in front of Neil's face, a box-score which clearly listed LaMarcus as having scored nineteen points for the Spurs. Instead, he only muttered "LaMarcus..."
Damian was dismayed to find that he could see the man's nipples through his dress shirt, even though the air conditioning in the building had been turned off to save money. He stood up from the table and decided to make as polite an exit as he could, on the off-chance that Neil was cognizant enough to receive sensory input from anywhere other than his own twisted mind. "Yeah, so, uh, I can definitely get LaMarcus back on the team. For sure. Um, see you around, Neil."
"Damian will bring back my LaMarcus," Neil said in that same voice with the strange inflection. He was still staring straight ahead, the printout of LaMarcus' picture having fallen from his limp hand.
Thoroughly unsettled, Damian quickly left the conference room, wondering what he had gotten himself into.
--
Digging through his drawer of defunct and obsolete electronics, Damian tried to remember which old phone of his would contain the contact that he wanted. Finally, he settled on an iPhone with a cracked screen and a blue plastic case that was severely discolored. Mentally crossing his fingers, he pressed the power button, and was surprised when the screen actually lit up. When it finished booting, Damian saw the battery was at 3% (having gone down from 4% as he watched), so he quickly scrolled through the contacts list. There, he found the name he was looking for. But would the phone number from seven years ago actually still work?
Taking out the much newer phone that he used for his day-to-day activities, Damian dialed the number that he could barely read through the shattered glass of the old phone's screen. Just as he got the last digit entered, the old phone flickered out, having consumed its meager remaining supply of battery power. But even if that old forgotten phone never turned on again, Damian had gotten what he needed out of it.
The phone was ringing. He had not gotten the "number disconnected" message that he had been bracing himself for. Maybe, somehow, this was actually going to work.
"Hello?" answered a voice that was surprisingly familiar. A voice belonging to ex-teammate J.J. Hickson.
"Hey J.J., it's Damian."
"Oh, hey Damian, what's up?"
"You wanna make an NBA comeback?"
--
Part II: • Damian Lillard All 226 Three-Pointers...
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