The Mavericks’ Luka Doncic, left, hits a winning 3-pointer in overtime of Game 4 of a first-round playoff series against the Clippers.
Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Associated Press
Behold the remarkable: a sports column, actually about something happening in sports. The following 900 or so words contain no mention of face masks, vaccines, quarantines, testing protocols, college football cancellations, Big Ten mutinies, Dr. Fauci or Zoom calls. There will be a few passing references to the fact that the NBA is playing basketball in a pandemic-provoked bubble, a stunt which remains both remarkable and hilariously bizarre, but they will be brief. I’m serious. I’m not even going to mention my children. (You: Sheesh, finally!) For the first time in nearly six months, this column is really, truly, aggressively about sports.
Thank you, Luka Doncic. Thank you, thank you, for hitting that 28-foot game-winning shot in overtime in Game 4 of Dallas’s opening-round Western Conference playoff series with the Los Angeles Clippers. I’d almost forgotten what it felt like, to get a little cuckoo watching sports on TV, to jump up and down in the kitchen and emit a noise I’m not sure should be emitted by humans. I slapped the counter. I scared the cat. As the ABC/ESPN play-by-play announcer Mike Breenpunctuated Doncic’s swish with his trademark, triumphant “BANG!”—Breen actually unleashed a double, a “BANG! BANG!” like he was pulling down a reserve Cabernet—it happened. I forgot the moment. I forgot that we’re not yet out of this mess, not even close. I forgot the anxiety, irritability and genuine panic that’s out there, the struggles of neighbors and friends. I forgot that in two weeks I resume being earth’s worst virtual schoolteacher.
Luka’s shot was that good—a walk-off, 3-point, see-you-in-48-hours face-melter, tying this contentious series at 2-2 and giving the Mavs a real chance to upset the favored Clippers. It was one of those shots we’d all be talking about at the office today, if the office wasn’t, you know, closed until who knows when.
I emailed Mark Cuban, the Mavericks owner. Cuban isn’t in the Orlando bubble—it’s jarring not to see him hovering near the Mavs bench, bouncing around in a T-shirt and jeans, agitated at referee calls. He was watching Sunday’s game at his home in Dallas. Turns out Cuban watches his team while exercising on the elliptical machine, as his family opts to watch in the other room.
“I’m too intense for them to watch with me,” Cuban told me.
And when Luka hit the shot?
“I was shirtless, dripping with sweat from more than two hours on the elliptical, but I ran full speed screaming into the living room and chest bumped with my son [Jake] and grossed out my very happy wife [Tiffany] with a huge hug.”
There you go. That’s Luka.
The basketball heads—including the Journal’s NBA maestro, Ben Cohen—have been telling us for years about Doncic, a wide-shouldered Slovenian who dominated the EuroLeague as a teenager and entered the NBA as the third pick in 2018, Dallas trading with Atlanta to nab him in a deal that already feels inexplicable, to say nothing of the two teams (Phoenix, Sacramento) that passed over him altogether.
What makes the 6-foot-7, 230-pound Doncic a menace is not a single, pronounced skill, but his overall vision—that sense of where you are, as Bradley told McPhee about all those years ago. Doncic is as fluid in traffic as he is in space; he will use that “Eurostep” footwork to joystick himself through a crowd to get a layup or pull open for a step-back jumper; if he draws too much defense, he’ll hit a cutting teammate for a layup. If he’s perturbable, I haven’t seen it—witness Doncic’s quick forgiveness for the Clippers’ Montrezl Harrell, who called him an “[expletive] white boy” during a confrontation in Game 3. “He apologized,” Doncic said Sunday. “I respect that. No problems.”
I know we’re all supposed to have a politically-charged take about the NBA and especially NBA TV ratings right now—who’s watching, who’s not, as if it’s an essential cultural Rorschach; when did the country turn into a nation of Nielsen researchers? Let me say it: to deny yourself Luka is to deny yourself a little joy. He is truly something. Doncic plays like he’s been in the league for a dozen years. He’s 21.
Luka Doncic celebrates after his game-winning basket.
Photo: Kevin C. Cox/Associated PressPlease know: The Clippers are a deeper basketball team than the Mavericks, and remain the favorite to win this series. Los Angeles has a pair of perennial All-Stars, Kawhi Leonard and Paul George. The Clippers swept the Mavs in the regular season. The Mavs were playing Sunday night without their second-best player, Kristaps Porzingis, and Doncic himself was a game-time decision after leaving Friday’s Game 3 with a twisted ankle. It’s true that Dallas has a historically deft offense, and the bubble has eliminated the traditional advantage of holding home court, but entering this series, the expectation was that the Clippers would eventually pat the Mavs on the head and say Better luck next year.
It isn’t happening, at least not yet, because of Doncic. The rise of any great is marked by a series of skeptical let’s sees—let’s see what happens when he has to do it under pressure; let’s see when he has to do it in the playoffs; let’s see when he has to do it with a season on the line. It’s taken Doncic a week to bulldoze almost all of the let’s-sees. What happened on Sunday (43 points, 13 assists, 17 rebounds) puts him alongside Portland’s Damian Lillard as the most electrifying player in the bubble and is a confirmation of what the basketball heads have been telling us all along. Now we are all seeing it, down there in that Disney biosphere with the pickle ball, unlimited bass fishing and players who cannot leave. It’s such a weird, unsettled time on the planet. Thanks to Luka Doncic for letting us briefly forget it.
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Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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