LaMarcus Aldridge and Damian Lillard cleared the air through text messages at the behest of Jamal Crawford. There had been an unspoken tension between the two since Lillard's arrival and Aldridge's subsequent departure in free agency.

"I keep telling him I’m going to come back and finish there. That’s something him and I have talked about — playing together again,” said Aldridge.

Lillard added that had they gotten to know each other while they were Blazer teammates, Aldridge would still be in Portland.

“If we would have talked about it, we would have still been playing together. There was a whole lot of that in our conversation. It was like…all of this could have been prevented," said Lillard.