Sam Amick

USA TODAY Sports

Damian Lillard won’t be at All-Star weekend in Toronto this month, when the NBA’s best will be celebrated while the Portland Trail Blazers point guard who was invited to that elite party the past two years will be back home waiting for the Golden State Warriors to come to town.

Considering the way Lillard is wired, the champs might be in trouble.

The 25-year-old is nothing if not vengeful, the kind of competitor who is driven by slights both real and imagined. It’s a mentality that helped him blaze this trail even before coming to Portland, from his days as a lightly-recruited high school prospect in Oakland, Calif. to his time at Weber State (Ogden, Utah) where he played all four years and evolved into a sixth overall pick in 2012.

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But Lillard shouldn’t need an All-Star selection to take pride in this season because of the one factor, that all-important thing that is too often overlooked in the discussion about individual play: winning.

Despite losing four starters during the offseason, chief among them perennial All-Star forward LaMarcus Aldridge to the San Antonio Spurs via free agency, Lillard’s Blazers have won eight of their past 10 games and are on pace to earn the most unlikely of Western Conference playoff spots. Not bad for a team that most critics had pegged for the lottery.

No one could blame for Lillard for being bitter about his All-Star reality, especially considering the spike in his personal statistics. Not only has his scoring increased from last season (21 points per game to 24.2, sixth in the NBA), but his assists (6.2 to 7.1 per) and three-point percentage have as well (34.3% to 37.1%). Couple that with Aldridge earning his fifth All-Star spot in large part because of the Spurs’ collective success as opposed to individual impact, and it’s enough to make Lillard go mad. Aldridge, who hasn’t spent such little time on the floor (29.4 minutes per) since his rookie season (22.1) but is integral to the Spurs’ 39-8 mark that’s the second best in the league, is currently 46th in scoring (15.8 points per) and 23rd in rebounds (8.6 per).

This debate about who was snubbed and who didn’t deserve an All-Star spot is a spin cycle of senselessness, if only because the system deciding such matters is far too flawed to warrant the outrage. Five starters are decided by a popularity contest/fan vote, and the final seven rosters spots in each conference are determined by a coach’s tally that is inevitably rife with personal politics and inexact sciences (like, say, the understandable belief that the Spurs simply deserved a second All-Star beyond Kawhi Leonard).

But amid all the pre-All-Star hype that is sure to come in these next few weeks, it’s worth keeping one eye on Lillard and his team as they attempt to outlast the Sacramento Kings, Utah Jazz, New Orleans Pelicans and Denver Nuggets that aren’t far behind (the seventh-seed Houston Rockets, it should be noted, are just 1 ½ games ahead of Portland). He has meshed beautifully with third-year guard C.J. McCollum, the 24-year-old who is a serious candidate for the league’s Most Improved Player (6.8 points and 15.7 minutes per game last season; 20.7 points and 35 minutes per this season). What’s more, he has shown the kind of leadership that will serve them all well during this expedited rebuilding stage.

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“I feel really good about it,” Lillard told USA TODAY Sports recently. “Coming into the season, I was saying it all along: ‘We’ve got a lot of talent. We’ve got a young team. So we may be a little bit inconsistent, but we’re going to go out there and fight, and we’re going to give ourselves a chance.’ And so far this season, we’re doing that.”

While merging their youth movement with a championship mentality.

“You get up every morning, and you’ve got a young team,” Lillard explained. “So it’s not like coach (Terry Stotts) is saying, ‘We’re not practicing today.’ There’s not as much slack. You don’t have the veterans out there trying to get an extra day, or trying to have practice be limited. You don’t have that, and the coaches see that we’ve got 19 year olds, and we’ve got 22-year-olds, and we’re going to work. We’re going to earn our stripes and we’re going to be ready. So it’s a battle.

“Every day, getting up, coming into the weight room, you’ve got to get your lift in. You’ve got to get out there and get your shooting in before we practice, and then we practice. And then we’ve got film, and then you’ve got treatment. It’s a battle because you do all these things, and you invest all this time, and everybody thinks it’s a rebuilding situation, so you’re invested in it (with) a championship habit, developing championship habits, but not a lot is expected. So it’s been a battle to go out there and be consistent in games, just doing all the things that a young team has to do and then go out there and try to win games. It’s been a constant battle.”

And more often than not of late, it’s one they’re winning.