Figman: Blazers G Damian Lillard Offers Advice To Young Players, Reacts To Signing Of Mo Williams

Adam Figman of Slam Magazine interviews Portland Trail Blazers guard Damian Lillard from EA Sports' headquarters in Florida. The reigning 2013 Rookie of the Year discusses video games and a bunch of other topics.

SLAM: You had an interesting tweet about young players placing too much value on getting buckets. What inspired that?

DL: There's a lot of younger guys from Oakland, from my area, guys that are in college that I follow on Twitter, and they're always talking about getting buckets. I kinda got a little bit irritated, because there are some guys-their team needs them to get buckets, but everybody can't get buckets. So I was just like, How are you valuable if your team doesn't need you to get buckets? What are you gonna do?

SLAM: Is that something you picked up during your rookie year?

DL: I mean, I realized that in college. But I've always kind of been in a role when my team needed me to get buckets. But at the same time, I know that if I ended up on a team where they didn't need me to, I'd still be a valuable player. So that's something that I wanted to put out there.

SLAM: What was your reaction to the Blazers signing Mo Williams?

DL: I thought that was a good pick-up. He's a veteran point guard. He's been on successful Playoff teams, he's been on bad teams and he's been around the League. There's a lot that I can learn from him and I can benefit from having him on the team with me.

Thanks to PonderGuy in the Fanshots.

-- Ben Golliver | benjamin.golliver@gmail.com | Twitter