Giving Thanks for Luka Doncic
his age—he won’t be able to buy a beer legally until February—but only a little bit. The Slovenian point forward is a sophomore in the N.B.A., but he signed his first professional basketball contract at the age of thirteen, and he has been playing against grown men, and beating them, for years. Still, when you watch him play, it’s as though you’re watching a kid build a universe with well-defined rules and then find a way to be free of them. Another way of saying this is that watching him is a lot of fun.
Fun has not been my primary experience of the N.B.A. lately. It’s not the players’ fault, but the main story lines this season and last have been on the serious side. Shortly before the season began, the league awkwardly handled the fallout from a tweet sent by the Houston Rockets’ general manager, Daryl Morey, which expressed support for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, upsetting the N.B.A.’s partners in China. After the games started, an endless debate about “load management”—the practice of intermittently resting stars who are healthy enough to play, in order to keep their bodies from breaking down—got under way. The context for that debate is grim: several of the league’s biggest names have missed numerous games due to serious injuries. The past two seasons have also been accompanied by much needed and appropriately sober conversations about mental health and player empowerment.
The numbers he puts up are absurd. He is averaging more than thirty points and ten rebounds and nearly ten assists a game—basically, a triple-double. The numbers have become gaudier as the season has gone on—no twenty-year-old in history has done what he’s been doing so far for a full season. (LeBron James came closest.) Very few people have done what he’s doing at any age, in fact, and they are all in the Hall of Fame.
But it’s not numbers that make Dončić thrilling. On Sunday, the Mavericks played the Houston Rockets, pitting Dončić against James Harden, who has already won the Most Valuable Player award once and could very well win it again this season. Harden may average forty points a game this season. Forty! It’s amazing to watch, but there is also a relentlessness to it. (The other day, the coach of the Denver Nuggets, Mike Malone, said that watching film of Harden “is like watching a horror movie.”) Harden plays the percentages—he’s like a machine-learning algorithm, shifting the parameters of his calculations with every new outcome, optimizing every shot. Defenders and opposing coaches have studied Harden’s game exhaustively, but it doesn’t matter: although everyone knows Harden’s strategy, no one can stop it. He’s mastered the game so fully that he sometimes seems in danger of breaking it.
Dončić has some of the same skills that Harden does. His step-back three—Harden’s most devastating weapon—seems to become more deadly with each game he plays. And there were sequences on Sunday in which Dončić seemed to be challenging Harden to an elaborate, high-stakes game of H-O-R-S-E. Like Harden, he is an élite passer who seems able to see the entire court at all times. But, in contrast to Harden’s style, there is a spontaneity, even a ridiculousness, to Dončić’s game. Late in the Mavericks’ season opener, against the Washington Wizards, Dončić dove toward the basket, and three defenders collapsed on him under the rim. He leapt, lowered the ball, shifted it from his right hand to his left, and sent it upward, an orange globe above a sea of waving arms. There was a cartoonish quality to the drive, like something out of “Tom and Jerry.” The ball dropped softly through
Vthe net.
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