There isn’t much that the Slovenian does badly on a basketball court – if anything – but there is a stat that’s beginning to paint a different picture and that’s not good news for him or the Mavericks who currently trail the Celtics 2-0.
Is Luka Doncic making enough effort on defense?
While it’s true that Luka Doncic is carrying multiple injuries in the NBA Finals, and heroically playing through them, there is no way to avoid the fact that he is beginning to cost the Dallas Mavericks on defense. To be fair, it’s not just Doncic either as you will see in the clip below. Indeed, there is also Kyrie Irving who like Doncic has been incredible on offense but against a team that doesn’t quit like the Celtics, it takes more than making your shots.
It’s also got to be said that as much as the narrative surrounding Doncic’s injuries must be factored in, said injuries have not stopped him from going crazy on offense. In Dallas’ Game 2 loss, the Slovenian played 42 minutes, scoring 32 points, while pulling down 11 rebounds, notching 11 assists, and making 4 steals. With the triple-double Doncic joined LeBron James (twice), Charles Barkley, and the late Jerry West as the only players to have 30-point triple-doubles in a Finals loss.
To be clear, it would be unfair to say that the Mavericks are where they are now because of Doncic’s apparent failures on defense. On the other hand, there is enough evidence to suggest that he could do better. Of course, should the Mavericks go down 3-0, a deficit that’s never been overturned in an NBA Finals, it like won’t matter if even he does.
Luka Doncic might be the star of the NBA at the moment but how about some love for his mother and grandmother, who both travelled to watch him compete against the Boston Celtics in Game 2 of the Finals?
Mirjam Poterbin and his grandma Milena Poterbin were both at the TD Garden in Boston on June 10 to watch Doncic bid to claw the Dallas Mavericks back into contention, although in the end he lost by seven points in a 105-98 defeat.
Throughout this postseason, there have been moments that summon a sort of Proustian memory of NBA playoffs past. The strongest foothold on our collective basketball memory left standing, however, isn’t so much a moment as it is an idea whose time … still hasn’t quite arrived. “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone,” T.S. Eliot wrote more than a century ago.
“His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead.” The beleaguered bewilderment in Luka Doncic’s eyes by the end of Game 2 against the Boston Celtics was the look of fatigue in the face of an overwhelming threat on the verge of history. I recognized that look.
It was the look of James Harden, six years ago, at the end of the Houston Rockets’ crushing Game 7 loss to the Golden State Warriors in the Western Conference finals—one of the biggest what-ifs in modern basketball.
These Dallas Mavericks, on the ropes down 0-2 in the 2024 NBA Finals, in style and spirit, embody the ghost of that 2017-18 Rockets team, arguably the best ever to not reach the Finals. Doncic came into the league less than a month after the Rockets’ untimely collapse and, like Harden in Houston, endured fits and starts before finding clarity in his sixth season on the team playing alongside an offensive genius seeking a new lease on his career in his 30s. Call it an inheritance of destiny, a transmigration of an unreconciled soul.
That 2017-18 Rockets team, entirely defined by the codominant coexistence of Harden and Chris Paul, was a revelation. It was a 65-win team (a win total surpassed by only 17 teams in history) that at one point won 17 games in a row (surpassed by only 11). It was the league’s most efficient offense with the best net rating.
Houston played 45 regular-season games with Harden, Paul, and primary roll man Clint Capela on the floor together; it won 42 of those games. This was simply a different brand of basketball. It was hooping on the edge of Occam’s razor. It was Doomsday Preppers: Moreyball Edition. It was building the plane entirely out of Synergy’s leaguewide percentile grades on scoring efficiency. Remember the feeling you got watching Luka’s stepback over Rudy Gobert set to Bad Bunny’s “Monaco”? Imagine that, but chopped and screwed over and over on a 19,755-minute loop.
It was the most cynical conception I’ve ever seen of what basketball could be: just about every possession intentionally involving Harden and/or Paul navigating a ball screen to take advantage of a mismatch on a switch, with the rest of the team—front office and coaching staff included—placing an irresponsible degree of trust in, admittedly, two of the smartest shot creators the game has ever known.
It was a lot of dribbling. (So much dribbling.) It was … riveting, in a way? Maybe not conventionally beautiful, but hypnotic in its rondo, compelling in its utter insistence. As a lifelong Mike D’Antoni zealot, I recognize the “Seven Seconds or Less” Suns to be D’Antoni’s most prevailing contribution to the basketball culture, but those 2017-18 Rockets were arguably his greatest triumph.
It was not a limitless, free-flowing offense; there were very clear limits with a defined stream pattern. Nonetheless, it was close to unstoppable with all the pieces in place. There have been more sustainable winning formulas, there have been better assemblages of talent, but how many other half-baked ideas took a team to the brink of the NBA Finals? That it ultimately resulted in the most consecutive missed 3-pointers in a game in league history—27!—almost adds to the myth, in hindsight. Or at least that’s what I tell myself all these years later.
Those Rockets were built on a very specific idea of how to win in 2018. What the Mavs have built is a variation on a theme, albeit without such stark ideology. Instead of cynicism, Dallas has surrendered to a kind of mysticism: The team’s whims and trajectory are governed solely by the belief that Doncic cultivates. Unlike Harden, Doncic takes points wherever he can get them; unlike Paul, Kyrie Irving doesn’t need to have his arm twisted to start cooking. Regardless of impetus, some combinations just work.
Doncic has always thrived playing alongside a fellow playmaker capable of shouldering a high usage, whether it be Jalen Brunson or Kyrie. Acquiring Dereck Lively II in last year’s draft and Daniel Gafford at this year’s trade deadline gave Dallas the lob threats that are a prerequisite for an offense built around the homing-device levels of touch that Doncic and Irving possess.
The separate deadline acquisition of P.J. Washington gave the Mavericks a versatile power athlete with some ability to create for himself on the second side—a melding of the posts held by the likes of Eric Gordon, P.J. Tucker, and Trevor Ariza in Houston back then. Like the Rockets before them, the Mavericks are powered by the attention that Doncic and Irving generate, often leading to lob attempts and corner 3s. It’s a blueprint that has gotten them this far. But after two games, the Celtics have cordoned off Dallas’s preferred scoring avenues by following the same strategy that the Warriors used against the Rockets six years ago.
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