PORTLAND — Damian Lillard has always had a dependable midrange game, but he spent time developing it over the summer. He was coming off his rookie season with the Portland Trail Blazers, and the league had delivered its hard lessons.

Playing point guard in the NBA is a physically demanding job, and Lillard knew he needed ways to preserve his career. More acrobat than bulldozer, Lillard could not continue to throw his 6-foot-3 frame at the basket with disregard for the consequences. He wanted his appendages to remain intact.

“If you can have more of a crafty game, it definitely won’t be as hard on your body,” Lillard said before Monday night’s 102-91 win over the New York Knicks. “If you don’t have to get into the lane and challenge bigs all the time, you’re not breaking your body down. You can play more relaxed.”

Lillard, 23, last season’s Rookie of the Year, has already established himself as one of the league’s most adept playmakers, and he was averaging 19.9 points, 6.1 assists and 4.2 rebounds this season for the 13-2 Blazers.

His advocates include the Knicks’ Carmelo Anthony, who said he considered Lillard to be an upper-echelon guard with a complete set of skills: shooting, passing, dribbling, defending.

“He just knows the game so well at such a young age, and you really don’t find that in this league these days,” Anthony said.

At the same time, the business of professional basketball is an unforgiving one, a reality reinforced by the news that the Chicago Bulls’ Derrick Rose had season-ending surgery Monday to repair a torn medial meniscus in his right knee. Rose’s misfortune seemed to have a chilling effect on the league, which had embraced his return after he missed all last season with a torn anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee.

“You hate to see that happen to anyone,” Lillard said, “but Derrick especially. We all know how hard he’s worked.”

For Lillard, who was on the bench last Friday when Rose was injured in a game here against the Blazers, it was difficult to process. And perhaps, Lillard said, he was better off not processing it at all. What good would it do?

“I can’t focus on it,” he said. “I can’t let myself. If an injury is going to happen, it’s going to happen.”

But while the potential for catastrophe is always there, Lillard has taken steps to protect himself. After leading the league in minutes played last season, he took several weeks off at the start of the summer. He filled his time by doing promotional work for Adidas, one of his sponsors.

It was a foreign feeling for him to step away from the game for so long — “I started panicking,” he said — but he considered it necessary.

Once Lillard returned to the gym, he honed his 3-point shot and his pull-up jumper, which required minimal wear and tear. Entering Monday, 44 percent of his shot attempts were 3-pointers, and he was sinking 39.4 percent of them, an improvement from 36.8 percent last season.

Only 36 percent of his field-goal attempts were coming at the rim. Lillard is not opposed to mixing it up in the lane, but he must balance the risks with the rewards.

At Weber State, Lillard modeled his game after Rose’s — the midair acrobatics, the way he absorbed blows from 7-foot demigods, the stop-and-pop jumpers. Rose, although only two years his senior, was everything Lillard aspired to be when the Blazers selected him with the sixth pick in the 2012 NBA draft.

“I looked up to him,” Lillard said. “I know I’m not the athlete that he is, but I think I’m similar to him in a lot of ways. He was an example to me.”

Yet in significant ways, Rose was in a class by himself. At his best, he was all relentless aggression, his game predicated on navigating through traffic and getting to the hoop. Even this season, as Rose searched for his form, 46 percent of his shot attempts were coming at the rim.

It required a lot of contact, and perhaps no guard — not even someone as gifted as Rose — can withstand that much punishment.