Luka Dončić, the Dallas Mavericks’ phenom, plays basketball like a child. This has a little bit to do with his age—he won’t be able to buy a beer legally until February—but only a little bit. The Slovenian point forward is a sophomore in the N.B.A., but he signed his first professional basketball contract at the age of thirteen, and he has been playing against grown men, and beating them, for years. Still, when you watch him play, it’s as though you’re watching a kid build a universe with well-defined rules and then find a way to be free of them. Another way of saying this is that watching him is a lot of fun.
Fun has not been my primary experience of the N.B.A. lately. It’s not the players’ fault, but the main story lines this season and last have been on the serious side. Shortly before the season began, the league awkwardly handled the fallout from a tweet sent by the Houston Rockets’ general manager, Daryl Morey, which expressed support for the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, upsetting the N.B.A.’s partners in China. After the games started, an endless debate about “load management”—the practice of intermittently resting stars who are healthy enough to play, in order to keep their bodies from breaking down—got under way. The context for that debate is grim: several of the league’s biggest names have missed numerous games due to serious injuries. The past two seasons have also been accompanied by much needed and appropriately sober conversations about mental health and player empowerment.
The biggest stars of the moment are eminently watchable, but most have a gravity to them. LeBron James has the air of a man who is justly aware of his full measure. Giannis Antetokounmpo is a delightfully implausible player, but the way he careens down the floor and crashes the rim is more awesome than silly. Anthony Davis, too, plays with breathtaking intensity. Joel Embiid is as impish as ever, but there is an edge to his trolling. The Golden State Warriors, meanwhile, who for several seasons seemed built on happiness, are a sad and broken team, wrecked by injuries and defections, playing in a shiny arena with the soul of a bank machine. (No one feels sorry for them.) Kawhi Leonard, who defeated the Warriors and led the Toronto Raptors to the title last season, is as stoic as they come: when he called himself a “fun guy,” it sounded so improbable and unpersuasive that it became a meme.
And then came Dončić, who’s all puppies and ponies. Perhaps, off the court, he has deep reservoirs of darkness; I have no idea. But his play makes me giggle.
The numbers he puts up are absurd. He is averaging more than thirty points and ten rebounds and nearly ten assists a game—basically, a triple-double. The numbers have become gaudier as the season has gone on—no twenty-year-old in history has done what he’s been doing so far for a full season. (LeBron James came closest.) Very few people have done what he’s doing at any age, in fact, and they are all in the Hall of Fame.
But it’s not numbers that make Dončić thrilling. On Sunday, the Mavericks played the Houston Rockets, pitting Dončić against James Harden, who has already won the Most Valuable Player award once and could very well win it again this season. Harden may average forty points a game this season. Forty! It’s amazing to watch, but there is also a relentlessness to it. (The other day, the coach of the Denver Nuggets, Mike Malone, said that watching film of Harden “is like watching a horror movie.”) Harden plays the percentages—he’s like a machine-learning algorithm, shifting the parameters of his calculations with every new outcome, optimizing every shot. Defenders and opposing coaches have studied Harden’s game exhaustively, but it doesn’t matter: although everyone knows Harden’s strategy, no one can stop it. He’s mastered the game so fully that he sometimes seems in danger of breaking it.
Dončić has some of the same skills that Harden does. His step-back three—Harden’s most devastating weapon—seems to become more deadly with each game he plays. And there were sequences on Sunday in which Dončić seemed to be challenging Harden to an elaborate, high-stakes game of H-O-R-S-E. Like Harden, he is an élite passer who seems able to see the entire court at all times. But, in contrast to Harden’s style, there is a spontaneity, even a ridiculousness, to Dončić’s game. Late in the Mavericks’ season opener, against the Washington Wizards, Dončić dove toward the basket, and three defenders collapsed on him under the rim. He leapt, lowered the ball, shifted it from his right hand to his left, and sent it upward, an orange globe above a sea of waving arms. There was a cartoonish quality to the drive, like something out of “Tom and Jerry.” The ball dropped softly through the net.
Dončić scored forty-one points against the Rockets, to go with six rebounds and ten assists. He outplayed Harden, and the Mavericks won in a rout. But it was popcorn stuff. It’s commonplace to compare ball handlers to chess players who see the game unfolding multiple moves ahead. But that’s not quite the right analogy for Dončić. Of course, he is a cerebral player—he calls most of the Mavericks’ offensive plays, and he can already control the flow of a game. And yet he seems to be making things up as he goes along. A pump fake turns into a casual lob. An imminent drive suddenly gives way to a three-point shot. (Dončić can change speeds and stop and start with the ball like few other players can.) What you think will be a floater is actually a laser pass to an open shooter in the corner: three more points.
Halfway through the fourth quarter against the Rockets, when Houston had nearly closed the gap with Dallas, Dončić winged a pass from behind the arc to Kristaps Porziņģis, on the far side of the basket, below the rim. Watching in real time, I wasn’t sure whether the ball had been tipped off a defender’s hand on the way—but, if it was, I felt, absurdly, almost certain that Dončić had made that happen intentionally. And, with a sports fan’s irresistible tendency to project, I thought that he must have done it because it would be funny.
I laughed. It was.
