The Americans on his European team knew that Doncic was a superstar. Now they have something else to say: We told you so.
The NBA team with the greatest offense in the history of the game is not the Warriors when they had Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. It’s not the Rockets teams built around James Harden and math. It’s not Magic Johnson’s Lakers or Larry Bird’s Celtics, and it’s not a team with Michael Jordan or LeBron James.
The team with the most powerful offensive machine the league has ever seen is this year’s Dallas Mavericks. They don’t have Steph, Michael or LeBron. They have Luka.
Luka Doncic is already one of the best players on the planet, and the only thing more impressive than his 28.9 points, 9.5 rebounds and 8.7 assists per game is his age: He is 20 years old. There has never been anyone so young with such outrageous numbers. The last time a player had comparable statistics was Oscar Robertson—before Doncic’s parents were born.
It has been a stunning ascent by any measure for someone in his second NBA season. But it’s not surprising to the handful of Americans who knew the name of Luka Doncic before almost everyone in the U.S. They had to. They were his teammates.
The former college and NBA players who moved to Spain to play for Real Madrid between 2015 and 2018 had the odd feeling of sensing that something was about to happen years before it really did. They were among the first people to look at a shy teen with a baby face and see the future of basketball. But when they told people back home about Doncic, every one of them encountered resistance. They had to convince the Americans in their lives that a Slovenian teen was as sensational as they claimed.
“They were skeptical,” said Jaycee Carroll.
“None of my friends in the States believed me,” said Trey Thompkins.
“Of course the first response was: Aw, no European can be that good,” said Anthony Randolph.
Luka Doncic is 20 years old. It’s the only number more impressive than his stats.
PHOTO: JEROME MIRON/REUTERS
The first time that Randolph realized that his precocious teammate really was that good was in a practice scrimmage a few years ago. It was hard for him to ignore the kid who was attempting to throw down a tomahawk dunk on him. Randolph looked around in disbelief. Who is this guy, he asked, and how old is he? That’s when he found out Doncic was only 17.
“He told me his age,” Randolph said. “I was in shock.”
Anthony Randolph is no longer in the NBA. But in that way the NBA has become a league full of Anthony Randolphs.
There was nothing that Doncic hadn’t accomplished by the time he came to the U.S. He won the EuroLeague with Real Madrid. He won EuroBasket with Slovenia. He won the MVP of the EuroLeague and he even won the MVP of the EuroLeague Final Four—which means he was the best player in the biggest games in the top league outside the NBA.
But he was still the No. 3 pick in the 2018 draft. The Suns passed on him after hiring Slovenia’s national coach, the Kings passed on him despite having a European general manager and the Hawks passed on him by trading back and drafting another point guard. His fans in Europe couldn’t wrap their minds around these decisions. They had never seen anyone at that age better than Doncic.
“No one else comes close,” said Dan Peterson, a legendary American coach who has worked in Italy since the 1970s. “Everyone knew. Everyone in Europe, that is. If the NBA had doubts, that’s their problem.”
Luka Doncic in 2014—when he was a youth player for Real Madrid.
PHOTO: GUILLERMO MARTINEZ/NURPHOTO/ZUMA PRESS
The question of how so many people could have been so wrong about Doncic will haunt the franchises that passed on him for a very long time.
It’s tempting to blame the behavior of NBA snobs on a distrust of international basketball even at a time when the game has never been so cosmopolitan. The U.S. no longer has a monopoly on talent.
The league’s Most Valuable Player is Greek.
The centers on last year’s All-NBA teams were Serbian, Cameroonian and French.
The face of the Mavericks used to be Dirk Nowitzki (German), and
now it’s Doncic (Slovenian) and
Kristaps Porzingis (Latvian).
Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has another theory.
“The NBA doubts every player coming in until they prove they can play,” he said.
Some of the only people who weren’t saddled by this bias happened to be the ones who had watched him play basketball more than anybody in the world. They were Americans in Europe who remember telling anyone who would listen that he was the real deal. They also remember what they heard in response. That he would be good, but not that good. That he’ll play against bigger, stronger and faster guys and he wasn’t big, strong or fast enough. That he’s not athletic. That he’s not in shape. That he’s too… Slovenian.
“Wait and see—just watch,” Randolph said. “Because I knew that Luka was a once-in-a-generation talent.”
“You’ll see,” Thompkins said. “You’ll see.”
“He did everything in Europe already,” Marcus Slaughter said. “It’s just that Americans now see it.”
Luka Doncic, then and now. PHOTOS: ZUMA PRESS; USA TODAY SPORTS
They saw it for themselves on the practice court. In the European system of basketball, Real Madrid’s players mingled with the players on Real Madrid’s youth team, which would be like Bronny James practicing with LeBron James. But when the stars of Spain’s best team studied the younger guys coming for their jobs, there was always one who stood out. Doncic was 15 and making players his own age look like toddlers. “What he’s doing now is what he was doing at that age,” Slaughter said. “He was completely dominating.”
But he was also holding his own on the senior Real Madrid team. His teammates noticed a complete lack of fear in someone who could have easily been terrified. When the Boston Celtics visited Spain in 2015, for example, Doncic played 16 minutes off the bench. He was 16 years old.
By the time he was 17, he was the best young player in Europe.
By the time he was 18, he was the best player in Europe.
“This guy is a cross between Magic Johnson and Larry Bird,” thought Bill Duffy, his agent, as he watched him.
But his last few months in Madrid were a bit of a Rorschach test. Cuban and Mavericks executives were among the people who saw a team of grown men deferring to Doncic with games on the line, but others saw a pudgy body and signs of inconsistency as Doncic fell into a slump toward the end of a long season.
His teammates knew which ones would be proven right.
Brian Rudolph still remembers the raspy voice instructing him to do something that sounded so extreme, so preposterous, so insanely radical that he was almost positive he would never see it again.
Loyola University Maryland was done with its morning shootaround before a November 2008 game against Davidson College when coach Jimmy Patsos realized the strategy that he’d devised for that night wasn’t going to work. Loyola was about to play the leading scorer in college basketball. Stephen Curry was already a problem without a solution. Patsos decided to scrap the game plan. Instead he wanted Loyola’s players to double-team Curry for the entire game.
“Huh?” Rudolph thought. “We just spent an hour at shootaround and didn’t work on this one time. But all right then. I guess that’s what we’re going to do.”
It backfired in spectacular fashion. Curry stood in the corner perfectly content to let his teammates play 4-on-3. Curry scored zero points. Davidson won by 30 points. Loyola’s players have regrets.
“I would’ve rather taken my shot against him and lost than play the way we did and lose by 30,” said Brett Harvey, a commercial real-estate broker in New York. “Now I wish I had that game back more than ever.”
That game more than 10 years ago would be the last time any team dared to get so crazy guarding Curry. At least until the NBA Finals.
Down by nine points with about five minutes left in a supremely weird Game 2 on Sunday night, the Toronto Raptors were as desperate as Loyola.
What happened next was one of the oddest strategic choices that you will ever see in the NBA. Raptors coach Nick Nurse called for a box-and-one: a rarely used gimmick in which four defenders play a zone (the box) while Fred VanVleet hounded Curry (the one). Nurse was putting himself at risk to be ridiculed. But it was also not that big of a gamble. The Raptors had nothing to lose since they were going to lose anyway.
“I was just trying to come up with something to stop them,” Nurse said.
It helped that Kevin Durant was out, Klay Thompson was injured and Golden State had about as many shooters surrounding Curry as that Davidson team. Curry called it “some janky defense” on Sunday night. He’d changed his mind by Tuesday afternoon and called it “innovative and unexpected.”
But the results suggest this strategy that could have easily been embarrassing was actually brilliant.
The question now is whether the Warriors will see it again in Game 3 on Wednesday. Durant is still out, Thompson is questionable with a hamstring injury and Nurse might go back to his janky, innovative, unexpected defense.
That he did it even once was such an unexpected twist that the NBA’s two best teams spent much of Tuesday battling a collective bout of amnesia to recall the last time they’d seen one. Warriors coach Steve Kerr reached all the way back to the 1980s. That’s when he was in ninth grade and the focus of his very own box-and-one.
“Very proud to announce that,” he said. “It’s probably something you see more often in high school. Even college you’ll see it. But I don’t remember ever seeing it in the NBA.”
The last time anyone could remember was the Brooklyn Nets using it against Charlotte Hornets guard Kemba Walker on Dec. 26. That’s how memorable it was: There were people who actually remembered a Nets vs. Hornets game the day after Christmas.
Curry didn’t have to think so hard.
“Probably last time I saw it,” Curry said, “was when I had a [Davidson] Wildcat jersey on.”
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Luka Doncic, then and now. PHOTOS: ZUMA PRESS; USA TODAY SPORTS
