There Was a Model for Luka Dončić. Now He’s Broken It

Six months ago, James Harden sat in front of reporters at a cramped press conference, his first since being traded to the Los Angeles Clippers. His face was half hidden by his famous beard, his eyes were unreadable, and his voice was soft. He was talking about how he had been handled by his previous team, the Philadelphia 76ers. He had been kept “on a leash,” he said. He wanted to have the freedom to create. “I think the game,” he explained. He could read the court, see the patterns, and adjust. “I’m not a system player, I am a system,” he said.

The Clippers promptly lost their first five games with Harden on the floor, and his critics, of whom there are many, mocked his words mercilessly. Harden, a system? He’d just forced his way out of Philadelphia, a year and a half after forcing his way off the Brooklyn Nets, a year after forcing his way off the Houston Rockets. He had never won a championship. If he was a system, it was a malfunctioning one. Then the Clippers began to win, going 26–5 from the start of December to the first week of February, and Harden’s play—his ability to strategize and execute, the way he complemented and unlocked the play of the team’s other aging stars—was the principal reason for the team’s turn. The criticism quieted down, for a while.

It was an odd critique, anyway, because Harden wasn’t wrong. Maybe more than any other top player, he understands basketball to be a series of statistical probabilities, and he hunts the most efficient scoring options, not the most dazzling ones. Analytics offered him—and Daryl Morey, the architect of the Houston Rockets, where Harden had his greatest success—a clear hierarchy. Even a decent midrange is often less efficient than an iffy three-pointer; shots at the rim are more efficient than that. And nothing is as valuable as getting to the free-throw line. So Harden shot a lot of threes, drove frequently to the rim, and, wherever he went, he made the kind of exaggerated maneuvers most likely to draw fouls. He nearly always had the ball in his hands, and when he passed it away he usually had an efficient result already in mind.

No one could deny that his approach had merit. He won the M.V.P. award, led his teams to the playoffs, and became the first guard since Michael Jordan to win three straight scoring titles. But, after a series of disappointing performances in the post-season, in which he seemed to disappear—and, with him, the Rockets’ fortunes—his reputation diminished. In Brooklyn, he played with other stars on an offensively-minded superteam, but the Nets did no better. The Sixers were already built around the center Joel Embiid. He and Harden played an excellent two-man game, and Embiid won the M.V.P. But the 76ers flamed out of the post-season, too; Harden was intermittently spectacular and invisible again. Then he made his way to Los Angeles.

There are plausible explanations for why Harden’s game may not translate to the playoffs. It becomes easier, in the post-season, when teams play one another night after night, for coaches to scheme against a single player. Referees become more likely to overlook contact, leading to fewer fouls, and weakening Harden’s scoring. Other great players have struggled in the playoffs—including Embiid—but Harden’s failures seemed to come in for more scolding, as though people were looking for a reason to disparage his style. Some commentators have decried the statistically minded turn the game has taken, and wondered, aloud, whether it was Harden’s fault. There was something soulless about his approach, as if he were filling in a spreadsheet instead of playing a game. He didn’t project the emotions that usually go along with effort. He rarely conveyed desperation or urgency or joy. His manner of play was all about gaining an upper hand, doing whatever it takes to win—a good thing, one would think. It just didn’t always look like it.

This year, four games into the first round of the playoffs, the harsher evaluations of Harden began to seem unfair. The Clippers were playing the Dallas Mavericks, and they were without Kawhi Leonard, a two-time Finals M.V.P., who had missed much of the series with a knee injury and was ineffectual when he was on the floor. Harden became the team’s first option. In Game One, he scored twenty-eight points in a victory. Dallas took the next two games, but, in Game Four, Harden almost single-handedly kept his team’s season afloat. The Clippers had squandered a thirty-one-point lead when, in the fourth quarter, he recognized a weak spot in the defense, a way into the lane. Down that path he went, again and again, sinking floater after floater. He finished with thirty-three points. Then, in Game Five, the Mavericks’ defenders picked up Harden early and harassed him to exhaustion. He scored just seven points in a Mavericks blowout. It was the tenth time in his career that he’d taken at least ten shots in a playoff game and made only two of them—an ignominious, if obscure, N.B.A. record.

Harden is thirty-four years old now; no one expects him to be the best player in the league anymore, and without Leonard it was clear that, even if the Clippers made it out of the first round, they weren’t going to win a title. Still, going into Game Six, on Friday night, Harden’s reputation seemed to hang in the balance, along with the Clippers’ season. Almost as a counterpoint, across the floor, was the player most likely to extend Harden’s legacy, or to complicate it.

Luka Dončić was drafted in 2018, with the third over-all pick, only days before Harden won M.V.P. This year, Dončić won the scoring title, with nearly thirty-four points per game, along with more than nine rebounds and almost ten assists. In April, he had his seventy-seventh regular-season triple-double, tying Harden for eighth-most in history. Dončić plays with the high emotions of a golden retriever. He is twenty-five years old.

When Dončić arrived in the league, almost six years ago, he was compared to Harden constantly. Like Harden, he handles the ball at a historically high rate. They are both scoring savants. Neither appears particularly athletic, but looks are deceiving: both have explosive first steps and an unmatched ability to decelerate. They have mastered shots with high degrees of difficulty, most notably step-back threes, while becoming virtuosos of the passing game. Even so, Dončić’s teams, like Harden’s, had some disappointing finishes—last year, the Mavericks didn’t even make it into the play-in tournament. With the ball in his hands, Dončić sometimes slowed the pace of the game until the ball seemed stuck. Despite his incredible passing, he seemed unable to elevate the play of his teammates, some of whom have gone on to greater success elsewhere.

But, in the course of the past year and a half, the Mavericks have gathered a group of young, athletic players, through the draft, free agency, and trades. The team also acquired Kyrie Irving, Harden’s former teammate on the Nets, an offensive wizard with remarkably quick feet, though he has often tripped over them when sharing his views on the world. At first, injuries kept Irving and Dončić off the floor together, but, as they settled in, Irving seemed to unstick Dončić. Both players recognize the game’s weird possibilities, and can create the unexpected. After the All-Star break, as the Clippers’ momentum slowed—and as Harden, in particular, started to struggle—the Mavericks took off. But they weren’t just playing better. Their identity seemed different.

In early March, people in and around basketball began to notice something unusual. Scores, after years of rising, were falling. Contact that had been called a foul not long before was allowed to stand. Eventually, the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, acknowledged that there’d been “a bit of an adjustment” in how refs were applying the rules. Games got more physical, and the Mavericks, just as surprisingly, embraced a new style. They played faster. They swarmed ball handlers, rotating quickly, moving their feet with unrelenting intensity. They went 16–4 to close the season, and boasted one of the league’s top defenses in that stretch. Teams have always tried to surround ball-dominant, offensive-minded players like Dončić and Harden with rim runners, spot-up shooters, and defensive specialists, to cover up for their star players’ defects. But Dončić—and Irving, who flew around the court—was part of the change in Dallas, not peripheral to it. He was still liable to get blown by on defense, and, when he’s beat, it stood out. But his increased effort on defense was noticeable, and effective.

After the first four games of the series against the Clippers, with the teams knotted at two wins apiece, Dončić was dragging. His voice was congested, a symptom of a nasty respiratory illness, and he’d begun wearing a brace after spraining his knee in Game Three. He’d been shooting terribly all series. But, even in his diminished state, the team was better with him on the floor than off it—particularly on defense.

In Game Five, he regained some of his old form, bulldozing into crowds of defenders, sending up little lobs, spinning and faking, stepping back and hitting off-balance shots. He finished with thirty-five points, to go with ten assists. He made the Mavericks seem like a flawed but thrilling and dangerous team. Game Six, though, was in some ways more interesting. Dončić again struggled to find his shot, and played for much of the game in foul trouble. Irving was the more spectacular of the two, spinning, driving, a dervish with the ball—his performance in the second half lifted the team to an easy win, clinching the series. But he and Dončić weren’t simply taking turns being in charge. They were playing off of each other, giving the team a free-flowing coherence. “This is a selfless group,” Irving said afterward. Not so long ago, that statement might have seemed dubious. But not anymore.

Watching Dončić and Harden in the same frame, one could notice that their similarities—the step-backs, the great pocket passes—were striking. But the differences were equally so. In his prime, Harden did a few things extraordinarily well, and when he did them they seemed impossible to stop. He was methodical. What Dončić does seems more intuitive, and riskier. Harden’s game can seem relentlessly deterministic. Dončić’s is like the discovery of quantum mechanics. We’re only starting to understand what it means for the game. ♦