So, as it turned out, Luka didn’t make it to May, either.
The Lakers’ first season (more of a half-season really) with Luka Doncic in place of Anthony Davis lasted five games longer than the Mavericks’ season did. I won’t say any names because we are all allowed an occasional brain freeze on television, but I heard one analyst say before Wednesday night that if the Lakers lost Game 5 to Minnesota, “Nico would be feeling better about that trade.
There are so many things wrong with that statement it’s hard to know where to begin, but let’s start with the fact that Mavericks GM Nico Harrison already feels great about his trade. That’s the problem. He said so the day after making it before going into hibernation for two months, then held two news conferences six days apart — one of them a strange invitation-only affair — to remind us that he still loves this deal and that he’s sorry Dallas fans liked Luka so much but that he intends to win a championship with defense, which was never going to happen with Doncic.
Every time Harrison says this it’s like fingernails on a chalkboard, as though he’s the first basketball guru to find his way to this outpost we call Dallas, and he has taken it upon himself to build a team from scratch and will gladly instruct us on how this whole thing works. The problem is that great coaches (or even wannabe great general managers) understand that you can adapt a lot of different winning theories and systems to the players you are dealt. Nico was gifted Luka and the team went to two conference finals and an NBA Finals in three seasons playing anything from average to good defense alongside an explosive offense led by You Know Who.
Can defense win championships? Sure, and it helps if you’ve got Bill Russell in the middle, not Anthony Davis and his 52 games a year. If Nico wants to see defense win a title, he can drive up I-35 and watch the Thunder, a team that, in addition to the rim protection Nico prefers to 30-points-per-game scorers, is built around great, young perimeter defenders. Where are those in Dallas? Max Christie isn’t exactly Lu Dort or Cason Wallace or Alex Caruso or likely league MVP SGA, for that matter.
Now. Back to the Lakers and their untimely demise.
It’s not good when a 3 seed loses to a 6 seed, but keep in mind that Los Angeles won one more game than Minnesota this season. The entire playoff field behind OKC was bunched from 52 to 48 wins. There are no upsets in the West other than someone beating the Thunder, and that’s not going to happen.
In his final game of the season, Luka went for 28 points, seven rebounds and nine assists. Yes, he was a liability on defense, and no one has suggested otherwise. But any time Rudy Gobert dominates (27 points, 24 rebounds), we know something has unspooled and we have flown back in time. Gobert is a player Luka erased from playoff series against Utah and Minnesota in recent years with just minimal help for the center position.
The Lakers have no center. Rather they have UT-ex Jaxson Hayes, who should be a backup center but played minimal minutes the first four games before sitting Game 5. Lakers coach JJ Redick actually played Maxi Kleber on Wednesday — his first action since playing for Dallas in January — but that didn’t press pause in Gobert’s Chamberlainesque performance.
The Lakers did not trade for Luka to win in 2025. Why they rescinded the trade they made for Charlotte center Mark Williams at the deadline is beyond me. He’s 7 feet tall, averaged 15.2 points and 10.2 rebounds for the Hornets and had a 26-16 game here in Dallas after LA deemed him unfit. Didn’t look that way to the Mavericks.
Regardless, Doncic played the second half Wednesday after taking a hard foul from Donte DiVincenzo in which you could almost see his vertebrae compressing like an accordion. But he scored 16 of his 28 after getting treatment at halftime and, for the night, he and LeBron James scored or assisted on 84 of the Lakers’ 96 points.
It needs to be more than that and surely will be, especially after LeBron retires and the Lakers are retooled with a Luka as the centerpiece. For all his health issues or defensive shortcomings, he showed at 23 he could orchestrate a Game 7 road blowout of a Phoenix Suns team that was defending conference champion. At 25, he showed he could be the best player on the floor in series with Oklahoma City and Minnesota, again winning huge road games in both.
He won’t play to 40 like LeBron, but who does? The Lakers have almost a decade to figure out how to add to their massive collection of banners with Luka. The Mavericks have two years to finish Nico’s thesis, an unnecessary experiment on the value of rim protection in the modern NBA.
