What if I told you that in the year Luka Doncic has spent with the Lakers, my favorite part of his game has become his early-in-the-shot-clock heaves?
Sure, maybe they’re bad shots. In the same way Paul George characterized Damian Lillard’s deep, deep shot that sent home his Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the 2019 Western Conference playoffs.
You can argue – those long 3-pointers of Luka’s are ill-advised, analytically dubious, lazy – with a wall.
What they are is a tone-setting, bloodletting first punch.
Steph stuff, Caitlin calculus; Luka letting opponents know before they even can get their feet or defense set: Don’t get comfy now. You think I won’t gamble? Try me. I’m crazy.
After a year in business with the guy, you’d think Luka’s bravado would rub off on the Lakers, that they’d want to take a cue from their new leading man and realize that the best shot might not be “the better shot,” and that the better fit might not be the best player.
But for now, the Lakers, like so many other teams, seem to be hoarding assets for a run at the great Giannis Antetokounmpo this offseason, if he’s still available then. If the Lakers don’t trade away a first-round pick now, they’ll have three first-round picks to offer this summer – and the chasm of cap space that they seem to be guarding too.
Never mind that Antetokounmpo, the apparently dissatisfied Milwaukee Bucks star, will probably go to a higher bidder anyway, and that he might not be a good enough shooter to fit ideally beside the heliocentric hooper the Lakers already have. Or that the 31-year-old’s athleticism will only wane.
I dare the Lakers to do something different, to have the audacity to do their own thing once more at the trade deadline.
Go, grab the board and don’t slow-walk it up the court – look fast! See who’s open and do it – do it! – give into the temptation to throw the touchdown pass, make the home run play, mix all the metaphors.
The Lakers don’t need to chase a square peg of a superstar. They need stars in their roles to fill the holes beside Doncic – oh, and LeBron James! Defenders and shooters to finish the project they started last Feb. 1, when they sent shockwaves through the whole wide sports world by dealing Anthony Davis for Doncic.
That trade – Davis and Max Christie to the Dallas Mavericks for Doncic, Maxi Kleber and Markieff Morris – was so bold and unexpected we all remember what we were doing when we learned of it. (Me? About to lose a MarioKart race to the kids, saved by the news.)
And we all thought the same thing, didn’t we, when we saw Shams Charania posts on social media? Hacked!
But no, Charania was strictly reporting facts that shocked and shook and were a shot in the arm for a Lakers organization whose future looked hazy whenever we started to wonder about life after LeBron.
Luka’s arrival was a bonafide bombshell, a blockbuster by every measure, including to the player himself, who landed, stunned, in L.A. a few hours later.
It was the start of a beautiful partnership, or what should be.
Already it’s been a popularity-padding arrangement for Doncic, who finished first in All-Star voting for the first time.
And already he’s produced a handful of historically significant scoring sprees, including joining Wilt Chamberlain as the only other player to score 200 or more points through the first five games of a season.
Like Luka, the Lakers seem in somewhat better shape for the playoffs than they were last year. Having traded Davis for Doncic and returned Mark Williams to the Charlotte Hornets after trading for him, they went into their first-round series against the Minnesota Timberwolves last postseason as a third seed without an adequate starting center. They floundered and got excused in five games.
Those sorts of finishes will sour the Lakers’ infamously impatient fan base fast – like how young superstars grow up; one night they’re 26, blink and they’re 30. This is it, we’re in Luka’s prime.
As the Lakers head back to Madison Square Garden for Sunday’s game against the New York Knicks – same place they were when the trade came down 365 days prior – this year’s squad has been hanging on to the fifth or sixth seed in the Western Conference standings.
The Lakers are 29-18 overall but just 14-14 since Dec. 1. They have a points differential of 0.0, finally out of the red following Friday’s 142-111 victory – in which Doncic notched a first-half triple-double – against the Washington Wizards. The trade deadline is five days away.
Last year, pulling off the heist to get Luka wasn’t the hard part – well, except maybe for keeping a straight face during negotiations with former Mavs GM Nico Harrison. The hard part is what comes now, setting up Luka to succeed, using the windfall to win championships.
It started: The Lakers got Luka Doncic! Now we’re going: They’ve had him for a year.
They can keep passing around the ball, looking for the perfect shot while the shot clock runs down, or they can fire off their front foot, maybe change the whole complexion of a season. Heave-ho.
I know what Luka would do.