PORTLAND, Ore. — With 30 seconds remaining in the Portland Trail Blazers' season-ending Game 6 loss to the Denver Nuggets, head coach Terry Stotts pulled his starters, allowing for a curtain call for Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum from the roughly half-capacity crowd allowed in the Moda Center.

In the building, as the Blazers' two star guards walked off the court, it felt like the end of an era. There was some symbolism to the way it went down: Lillard walking off the court after the Blazers blew a 14-point third-quarter lead that would have evened the series and forced a Game 7, 48 hours after his 55-point performance in double overtime in Denver that also came up just short.

That's been the story of Lillard's nine years in Portland. He's become one of the NBA's biggest stars, the avatar of small-market stability and in every way the model of a franchise player. Alongside Stotts and McCollum, Lillard's Blazers have always been just good enough to make you think this was the year they had a real shot, year after year.

On Thursday, everyone involved came to the collective realization that just good enough wasn't actually enough. Not for Lillard's goal of bringing a title to Portland. As the final buzzer sounded, the kind of sweeping changes the Blazers have avoided for nearly a decade became a matter of when, not if.

"I don't know what a shakeup looks like or what changes will be made, or could be made," Lillard said after the game. "But obviously, as is, it wasn't good enough."

The first domino fell Friday night, with the team announcing it had mutually agreed to part ways with Stotts after nine seasons. That move has been widely expected around the league for months—the combination of a fourth first-round exit in five years and the league's second-worst defense this season will usually end that way.

Lillard turns 31 in July, with the four-year, $196 million extension he signed in 2019 about to kick in next season. When he inked that deal, the Blazers were coming off an unlikely Western Conference Finals run, and Lillard was boundlessly optimistic that he could win a title in Portland without leaving to join a superteam.

Since then, he's practically built his entire brand around being the guy who stayed in a small market, giving interview after interview about the importance of loyalty and taking Instagram shots at Paul George for "running from the grind."

It was easy for Lillard to position himself as the NBA's model teammate and citizen when he could at least talk himself into believing the Blazers were a few lucky breaks from true contention.

But those breaks never came. The Blazers seemed to be in prime position to upset the No. 3-seeded Nuggets, who were missing practically their entire backcourt rotation, including star guard Jamal Murray. If they'd won that series, they'd be facing a young, inexperienced Phoenix Suns team in the second round featuring Chris Paul playing on a bad shoulder. A timeline exists where this team had a 2019-like Cinderella run to the Conference Finals, which may have been enough to save Stotts' job and keep Lillard happy with the status quo.

That they couldn't get it done against a shorthanded Denver team, despite Lillard turning in an all-time great playoff performance in Game 5's double-overtime loss, has made him realize what most NBA observers have figured out by now: that there's a hard ceiling on a team built around two undersized scoring guards, changing out one underperforming wing for another (Al-Farouq Aminu for Trevor Ariza for Robert Covington) and getting by with a thin frontcourt behind talented but injury-prone starting center Jusuf Nurkic.

So Lillard has two choices: force a trade, as so many others have done in his position, or get a lot more hands-on with building his supporting cast.

The former would be tough to envision even if Lillard were to want out, as he's under contract for too long to have any real leverage. No contending team can offer Portland anything close to fair value. Trading a player of his caliber would also greatly complicate the efforts of Jody Allen, the sister of late Blazers owner Paul Allen and the team's current acting governor, to sell. It's just not going to happen, at least not now.

But breaking from his nature and forcing the issue a little bit on the Blazers' future moves? That's something Lillard can do and has already started to do.

Barely two hours after the Blazers made Stotts' exit official, Lillard made his coaching preference known, telling Yahoo Sports' Chris Haynes that Jason Kidd is "the guy I want." Minutes later, Lillard told The Athletic's Jason Quick and Shams Charania that he would also accept Chauncey Billups, who is believed to be team president Neil Olshey's preferred choice to succeed Stotts.

It was a move totally out of character for Lillard and largely unprecedented even in an age where players at his level usually have the final say. LeBron James has never gone on the record with a reporter naming the coach he wants his team to hire. Neither has Kevin Durant, James Harden, Kawhi Leonard or any of the other superstars who have become the faces of the "player empowerment" era. There's a lot of offseason still to play out, but it sure looks like a sign of things to come in Portland.

Over the years, Lillard has been active on social media when it comes to recruiting players (Carmelo Anthony, Draymond Green). But as for throwing his weight around for actual roster moves, he's largely taken a hands-off approach. In a December postgame Zoom media session, The Athletic's Sam Amick asked how involved he is in the team's personnel decisions. His answer was revealing.

"I have personal relationships with my teammates, so I don't like to be the guy responsible for saying, 'All right, let's do this and let's get rid of this guy and let's bring in this guy,'" he said. "But they asked me to name a few players that I liked, that I felt like could help our team. And I did that. Our front office did their job. I didn't go in there (and) demand anything. They just asked me the names of players I liked, and that's what I did."

In the wake of another early playoff exit and the departure of the only coach he's played for in the NBA, Lillard's tune has changed in a big way, and he feels it's time for him to call the shots like other superstars do.

The Blazers will go through the motions of conducting a coaching search, and ESPN's Adrian Wojnarowski named Billups, Mike D'Antoni, Jeff Van Gundy and Juwan Howard as potential candidates. But what Lillard wants, Lillard will get, and he's made it clear he wants Kidd or Billups, so it will be one of those two.

The same will be true of free agency and trade season. If Lillard decides it's time for his partnership with McCollum to end, McCollum will be moved for a complimentary star who Lillard feels fits better. His free-agent targets will become the organization's free-agent targets. They have no choice. Lillard has let Olshey call the shots for this long, not wanting to overstep boundaries, and the result has been four playoff series wins and one Western Conference Finals appearance. Now, he wants to do it his way.

The merits of Lillard's requests aside (and there are certainly well-documented reasons for any organization to have serious reservations about hiring Kidd), the alternative seems to be risking him becoming the next star to ask for a trade, and that's something the Blazers are in no position to stomach. It may take another decade for the franchise to recover if that happens.

For the foreseeable future, every move the Blazers make will have Lillard's fingerprints all over it. If they win a title in the second half of his prime, it will be with the team he built.

Lillard has been the face of the Blazers' stability and consistency for nine years. Now, he's finally taking matters into his own hands to see if that loyalty can turn into something more.

Sean Highkin covers the NBA for Bleacher Report. He is a graduate of the University of Oregon and lives in Portland. His work has been honored by the Pro Basketball Writers' Association. Follow him on Twitter, Instagram and in the B/R App.