{"id":616734,"date":"2026-02-22T00:36:18","date_gmt":"2026-02-22T00:36:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/616734\/"},"modified":"2026-02-22T00:36:18","modified_gmt":"2026-02-22T00:36:18","slug":"joe-cronin-shares-reaction-to-blazers-signing-damian-lillard-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/616734\/","title":{"rendered":"Joe Cronin Shares Reaction to Blazers Signing Damian Lillard"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It still doesn&#8217;t feel completely real that Damian Lillard is on the Portland Trail Blazers roster again. <\/p>\n<p>Even though Lillard signed with the team over the summer, he has not played for the Blazers this season due to his recovery from a torn Achilles. Fans caught a glimpse of Lillard back with the Blazers when he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.si.com\/nba\/trailblazers\/onsi\/news\/portland-trail-blazers-damian-lillard-eyes-history-after-three-point-contest-win\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">won the Three-Point Contest at All-Star Weekend<\/a>, but it still hasn&#8217;t sunk in that he&#8217;s with the team. <\/p>\n<p>Blazers general manager Joe Cronin got the ball rolling to make it happen and he <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wweek.com\/news\/2026\/02\/18\/a-job-interview-with-joe-cronin\/\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">shared his initial reaction when the team initially re-signed him<\/a> in an interview with Robert Ohman and Aaron Mesh of the Willamette Week.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I was by myself. I was in Vegas at Summer League, and I was in my room. So I wasn\u2019t able to celebrate or anything, but I was just so incredibly happy. I just had a big smile on my face, like, OK, we did it. He\u2019s back,&#8221; Cronin said in his interview. <\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Throughout that day and evening, I got so many notes and messages and heard so many stories about how everyone just kind of went nuts. I got notes from other players and things like that: All is right in the NBA again, Dame\u2019s back with Portland. I could feel those ripples and it was really cool.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It still doesn&#8217;t feel completely real that Damian Lillard is on the Portland Trail Blazers roster again. Even&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":616735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3784],"tags":[7,601,6,687,471,3967,1617],"class_list":["post-616734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-portland-trail-blazers","tag-basketball","tag-blazers","tag-nba","tag-portland","tag-portland-trail-blazers","tag-portlandtrailblazers","tag-trail-blazers"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/116111486771505125","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=616734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/616734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/616735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=616734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=616734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=616734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}