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.
A look at the tragic consequences of underestimating the enemy. During the Second World War, the British commander of Singapore believed it to be an impregnable fortress until a numerically inferior Japanese Army overran it. Similarly, 12 years on, the French lost the mountain garrison at Dien Bien Phu after failing to anticipate the resourcefulness of General Giap and his Vietmanese peasant army.
We have long saluted military genius and bravery. But the other side of the coin is military incompetence – a largely preventable, tragically expensive, yet totally absorbing aspect of human behaviour.
From the Crusades to Vietnam, history is littered with examples of stupidity, obduracy, brutality and sheer breath-taking incompetence. Lack of communication, technological failure and a misplaced sense of superiority have led to the deaths of thousands of ordinary soldiers, let down by their masters and betrayed by arrogance. Using a combination of history, human interest and archive footage underpinned by powerful story-telling, Great Military Blunders charts man’s folly and cruelty in a series of stunning debacles, spanning almost a thousand years of conflict.
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Although it was a high-tech conflict with newly lethal weapons, he writes, it still followed patterns established over millennia: “British, American, Italian, and German soldiers often found themselves fortifying or destroying the Mediterranean stonework of the Romans, Byzantines, Franks, Venetians, and Ottomans.” In many instances, military planners on both sides ignored the lessons of the past. Some lessons were local: it’s always been hard to “campaign northward up the narrow backbone of the Italian peninsula,” for example, which is exactly what the Allies struggled to do.
.. History shows that the only way to win a total war is to occupy your enemy’s capital with infantrymen, with whom you can force regime change. Hitler should have paused to ask how, with such a weak navy, he planned to cross the oceans and sack London and, later,Washington. At a fundamental level, it was a mistake for him to attack countries whose capitals he had no way to reach.
.. Before the war, the United States produced a little more than half of the world’s oil; Axis leaders should have known this would be a decisive factor in a mechanized conflict involving tanks, planes, and other vehicles. (The Nazis may have underestimated the importance of fuel because—even though they planned to quickly conquer vast amounts of territory through blitzkrieg—many of their supply lines remained dependent upon horses for the duration of the war.)
.. Axis leaders believed that Fascism could make up the difference by producing more fanatical soldiers with more “élan.”
For a brief time at the beginning of the war, Allied countries believed this, too. (There was widespread fear, especially, of Japanese soldiers.) They soon realized that defending one’s homeland against invaders turns pretty much everyone into a fanatic.
.. the Allies had bigger, faster factories and could produce more guns and shells. “The most significant statistic of the war is the ten-to-one advantage in aggregate artillery production (in total over a million large guns) enjoyed by the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States over the three Axis powers.”
Russia, meanwhile, excelled at manufacturing cheap, easily serviceable, and quickly manufactured tanks, which, by the end of the war, were better than the tanks the Nazis fielded.
.. had Hitler chosen not to invade Russia, or not to declare war on the United States, he might have kept his Continental gains.
.. But temperance and Fascism do not mix, and the outsized ambitions of the Axis powers put them on a collision course with the massive geographical, managerial, and logistical advantages possessed by the Allies
.. The Axis powers fell prey to their own mythmaking: they were adept at creating narratives that made exceedingly unlikely victories seem not just plausible but inevitable. When the Allies perceived just how far Fascist fantasy diverged from reality, they concluded that Axis leaders had brainwashed their citizens and themselves.
.. The Axis countries lived in a fantasy world—they believed their own propaganda, which argued that, for reasons of race and ideology, they were unbeatable. The Allies, meanwhile, underestimated their own economic might in the wake of the Great Depression. They allowed themselves to be intimidated by Fascist rhetoric; justifiably horrified by the First World War, they wanted to give pacifism a chance, and so refrained from the flag-waving displays of aggression that might have revealed their true strength, while hoping, despite his proclamations to the contrary, that Hitler might be satisfied with smaller, regional conquests.
“Most wars since antiquity can be defined as the result of such flawed prewar assessments of relative military and economic strength as well as strategic objectives,”
May had a “very simple message” for the Kremlin. “We know what you were doing and you will not succeed,” she said, “because you underestimate the resilience of our democracies, the enduring attraction of free and open societies, and the commitment of Western nations to the alliances that bind us.”
Trump’s message to the Kremlin is simple, too: Do what you want.
.. He believes President Vladimir Putin is “sincere” in denying Russian attempts to meddle in the American elections ..
.. Far from denouncing Putin’s continuous assaults on human rights and free speech in Russia, Trump has praised him as being a better leader than Obama.
.. Contrast Trump’s behavior not just with May’s, but also that of Ronald Reagan, who was viscerally opposed to Communism and entered office determined to bring down the Soviet empire.
.. In February, when Bill O’Reilly pointed out to Trump that Putin is “a killer,” the president replied: “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, do you think our country’s so innocent?”
Luka Doncic, then and now. PHOTOS: ZUMA PRESS; USA TODAY SPORTS
