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Luka Dončić, the Dallas Mavericks’ phenom, plays basketball like a child. This has a little bit to do with 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 biggest stars of the moment are eminently watchable, but most have a gravity to them. LeBron James has the air of a man who is justly aware of his full measure. Giannis Antetokounmpo is a delightfully implausible player, but the way he careens down the floor and crashes the rim is more awesome than silly. Anthony Davis, too, plays with breathtaking intensity. Joel Embiid is as impish as ever, but there is an edge to his trolling. The Golden State Warriors, meanwhile, who for several seasons seemed built on happiness, are a sad and broken team, wrecked by injuries and defections, playing in a shiny arena with the soul of a bank machine. (No one feels sorry for them.) Kawhi Leonard, who defeated the Warriors and led the Toronto Raptors to the title last season, is as stoic as they come: when he called himself a “fun guy,” it sounded so improbable and unpersuasive that it became a meme.
And then came Dončić, who’s all puppies and ponies. Perhaps, off the court, he has deep reservoirs of darkness; I have no idea. But his play makes me giggle.
The numbers he puts up are absurd. He is averaging more than thirty
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