After a decade at the Portland Trail Blazers, point guard Damian Lillard could only take so much losing chances to get to the NBA Playoffs as the best shape of his life moved away from him. Any great NBA star will tell you that a professional career should have the NBA championship as a goal. Out of all the greatest players in the league’s history, there is only a handful that wasn’t able to win that trophy and live in bitterness during retirement. At the same time Damian Lillard was going through a trade to the Milwaukee Bucks, he also went through a divorce. Understandably, Lillard suffered depression for a long time and struggled during his first season in Wisconsin.

Damian Lillard suffered depression

One of the people who lived through that alongside Lillard is coach Doc Rivers, who was recently at ‘The Bill Simmons Podcast‘. The coach talke about the difficulties that Damian went through and he also confirmed the star is much more involved in the game as well. Adding insult to injury for Lillard, last season also happens to be the one in which Giannis Antetokounmpo suffered a serious injury that kept him out for the majority of the season. For Lillard, leaving his entire world that also involves his children is what made him fall into a big depression. A complicated sensation that got him in the worst shape of his entire life. But that is all in the past now.

Here’s what Rivers said: “That was really hard. I didn’t even realize that Dame was traded two or three days before training camp. We were at dinner, and he said, ‘Coach, I didn’t work out all summer. It’s the first time in my life that I’ve not worked out. I was so scared of getting injured working out.’ He knew he was gonna get traded. So, he said, ‘You know, I did some light running. I did some shooting with no one in the gym. But I didn’t go at all.’ He said, ‘I’m out of shape,’ and he was honest about it, and that’s one of the reasons you love him because he is honest. He said, ‘This is the worst shape I’ve ever been in’. When you start camp that way you don’t ever get in shape. You never catch up, and he felt that way. It’s funny, I start calling him names, like joking with him talking about his weight and he’s heavy.”