The Lakers are 37-25, but their struggle against good teams has been subject to much discourse. Last night they lost a tough one to the Nuggets 120-113, a loss which snapped their three-game winning streak. LeBron James beat Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s all-time record for field goals made, but that did little to ease the sting of another loss to a playoff-caliber opponent.
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For the eighth game in a row, Luka Doncic led the Lakers in scoring. He finished the game with 27 points, and he also pitched in 11 rebounds, 7 assists and 4 steals. The most noteworthy part of his night, though, had everything to do with the wrong kind of stat, because in the second quarter he was whistled for his 15th technical of the season, putting him just one T away from a mandatory one-game suspension.
On this morning’s Get Up, former Mavericks beat reporter Tim MacMahon shook his head and sighed before he started his diatribe, because this is far from the first time he’s seen this kind of thing from the Slovenian superstar.
“Yeah, and Luka didn’t think he deserved this technical,” he said. “We’ll see if the league office agrees. They tend to be more lenient with Luka in terms of rescinding technical fouls the closer he gets to a suspension.”
“But it’s not even really about the risk of a suspension here,” he continued. “Why didn’t you see what Luka did to get a technical foul? Because it happened right after he missed a shot. He wanted to complain instead of getting back on defense. The refs weren’t gonna blow the whistle to stop the transition possession, and so they wait until it’s a wide-open 3 because it’s 4-on-5 basketball.”
Like anybody who has spent a lot of time watching Luka play, MacMahon is appreciative of his talents but just fed up with his on-court immaturity.
“That’s the thing with Luka,” he said. “Forget about the T’s, you constantly complain instead of getting back on defense. This happens multiple times a game, hundreds of times a year … I don’t want to hear how much Luka wants to win if he’s going to continue to prioritize whining over running back on defense. He’s putting his team in a bad spot over and over again,” MacMahon asserted.
MacMahon is far from the only one to say this. Udonis Haslem also expressed something similar on NBA on Prime last night, saying, “The next step of evolution for Luka, stop whining. Stop complaining to the refs. You’re not gonna beg your way to a title or cry your way to a championship.”
Most players mature as they get older. They work on their deficiencies, but Luka has always been arguably the biggest complainer in the league. It’s a black mark on an otherwise terrific player, but it looks even worse since even when he does get back, his defensive reputation is already pretty abhorrent. It’s one thing to be bad at defense, it’s another to not even try.
Everything is magnified when you’re on the Lakers, and Luka is finding that out the hard way. The team has a good record, but nobody seems to take them seriously as a contender, in part because of things like this. The Lakers can’t get stops, and the frequency with which they get blown out in their losses is an alarming indication of their maturity.
Teams are made in their leader’s image, and in that respect, Luka is killing the Lakers with his petulant behavior and his refusal to D up. Somewhere, Nico Harrison is laughing right now, because until Luka wises up, the Lakers aren’t going to be the big trade winners it looked like they were.
