Milwaukee Bucks news: Trades are never easy. Not even if the player involved actually demanded the trade in the first place.
This is exactly the case for Damian Lillard, who has now joined the Milwaukee Bucks to try and win his first-ever career championship. It’s an undeniably bittersweet situation for the seven-time All-Star, though, as he bids farewell to the Portland Trail Blazers after 11 years with the organization.
Damian Lillard Gets Real on Milwaukee Bucks Trade
In a recent interview with Marc J. Spears of andscape, Lillard got brutally honest about his recent move to Milwaukee.
Dame’s saga took a full two months since he declared his intention to leave Portland. It was a dragging situation for Lillard, to say the least, but in the end, it was what he wanted. It did not make things any easier, though.
When asked what he feels is the toughest part in all this, Lillard pointed to his “tight group of friends” who helped him get through all the drama. Dame also noted that his faith also played a key role in his journey.
Be that as it may, the 33-year-old admitted that uprooting his family is the toughest pill he’s had to swallow:
“The hardest time came, I would say, when I started to really think about having to move my kids from an environment that they’ve become accustomed to,” he said. “The same people that they see, the friends that they have, the people that help out with them that they spend a lot of time with, being around their cousins.
“It could be a random Sunday where my mom might be like, ‘We are doing Sunday dinner at my house.’ And when we get there, it is my brother’s kids, all my cousin’s kids. It is 16 kids running around and my kids there with them. It is like I’m stripping them of that environment for what I want for myself. So, when I actually sat with it becoming a reality, that was when it was the toughest moment for me.”
That’s tough. And the fact that he knows deep down that it’s his own wish to leave Portland in order to move forward in his professional career has to make everything even more difficult. His own personal decision put his family in a rather undesirable situation.
Lillard spent more than a decade with the Blazers, and there’s no denying that he made more than a few connections during this period — both on and off the court. It has to be even tougher for his kids. Dame had family in Portland, and for him to have to force had kids out of that situation can’t be easy.
As they always say, though, this all comes with the territory.
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