For Lillard’s sophomore year, he transferred to the powerhouse program of St. Joseph Notre Dame, most famous for producing Jason Kidd. Once again, his Oaktown roots would work against him. St. Joe’s was a prep school with a men’s basketball coach, Don Lippi, who wouldn’t warm up to Damian’s fire. “I was one of the better players,” Lillard remembers, noticeably still unsettled by the memory. “But the coach had an issue with me like, ‘You’re too aggressive, and you talk trash.’ I didn’t talk trash like that, but if I block somebody’s shot, ‘Get that shit outta here.’ If I do a move and score on you and I’m running back and you in the way I’m gonna bump you. I’m like, I’m not the problem. These niggas need to get tougher.”

More so than his aggression, the then-5’5” PG’s biggest obstacles were the three senior guards playing ahead of him. So he rode the bench all season. The camel’s spine was severed during the final sit-down between Dame and Lippi. “We have a meeting, ’cause he meets with all the players at the end of the year, and he’s telling me how I might not be on the team and I’m gonna have to really earn it. He asks me, ‘What do you want to do?’ I say, ‘I wanna play in the league.’ So he goes, ‘One second,’ pulls out a notepad and says, ‘This many kids play college basketball. This many play Division I. This many play pro. This many make it to the NBA. You really think you’re gonna be a part of this?’ So I’m looking at him like, Wow, that’s cold. Like, even if I’m not gonna make it to the NBA, you’re not supposed to tell me that.”

“I say that to everybody at 14 years old,” Lippi says today. “Because everybody thinks they’re going to be in the NBA. But Dame would’ve been our starter the next year. That wasn’t even a question. There were three seniors ahead of him, and they were all graduating. He was the best guard coming back.”

Today, Lillard and Lippi’s accounts stand incongruent. One fact is clear: During that meeting, 15-year-old Dame had reached his threshold. “I straight went home to my dad and was like, I can’t go back there,” says Lillard. “He didn’t fight me on it at all. So I transferred to Oakland High, and I was on after that.”