Luka will live and learn

Luka Doncic is good enough to win a championship, but good enough isn't enough. He doesn't have to look far for inspiration.

The NBA Finals are over. Maybe they officially end Friday, maybe Monday, but they’re done. Boston will win, and Dallas will lose.

This may end up being the best thing to happen to Luka Doncic.

Doncic’s NBA success has been nearly unprecedented. He was a top-five MVP vote-getter in just his second year in the league, when he averaged 20-9-9 as a 20-year-old. He made it to the Western Conference Finals in his fourth season. He led the league in scoring this year and survived a brutal gauntlet of teams to make it to the championship.

No one doubts Doncic’s skill or resume. But all his success has almost come despite himself.

There have been questions about Doncic’s conditioning for years, and while those are overblown, there’s always room for him to improve that aspect. Like many mid-20s superstars, he hasn’t had to work on his body to succeed (Michael Finley taking away Doncic’s beer after they won the Western Conference Finals will never not be hilarious; the Mavericks haven’t won a game since.). Doncic has shot just 20% in fourth quarters in the NBA Finals and has visibly been fatigued. Injuries haven’t helped, but he hasn’t shot this poorly in the first three frames.

But conditioning, truthfully, is the least of his issues. Doncic’s whining and belittling of officials (he flashed yet another “money” sign at the referees Wednesday night, and it’s far from the first time) has long been off-putting. Screaming at the refs instead of getting back on defense is a time-honored superstar tradition, but Doncic takes it up a notch in ways that are consistently and actively harmful to the team. He’d much rather stay behind to cry than exert effort (maybe this is a strategy to catch his breath?), leaving his teammates scrambling to cover up for his absence.

He wasn’t always wrong, either. Doncic was hacked several times without getting a whistle. But it doesn’t matter. This is the NBA Finals; you have to play defense. Take a page from Tatum, also the victim of several no-calls, and complain while sprinting back!

In general, Doncic has never looked worse defensively. He’s hampered by injury and playing a team stacked with on-ball creators who can attack him, but like my toddler’s paper airplane attempts, those excuses only fly so far. The Celtics have savaged Doncic, breezing by him with consistent ease time after time. Some of this is part of the defensive gameplan, Doncic using his body to direct ballhandlers to the help defense, but a lot of it is simply faster players racing by a slower one whose effort waxes and wanes. And it’s not just the on-ball stuff; Doncic has been consistently late in rotation and inattentive off-ball. It’s been bad for reasons both within and outside his control.

Current physical limitations are playing a part. We’ve touched on health and conditioning, but Doncic has looked more lead-footed than Michael Schumacher. Luckily, it’s a common misconception that players can’t get quicker. Doncic will never make an All-Defensive team, and few teams have as many weapons willing and able to attack Doncic as Boston. But he has to be more agile at the point of attack. It requires effort, motivation, and work; a lot of thankless ladder drills in the morning, maybe skipping a Bud Heavy for a Bud Light in the evening (or whatever the Slovenian equivalent is). Tough sacrifices, to be sure, but that’s what being a champion requires.

If Doncic is as competitive as we think, though, the physical stuff will be the easy part. Doncic’s fiery temperament is part of what makes him great. Nobody wants him to tone down his passion, or even his rage. For a player like Doncic, playing mad is a good thing, but there’s a fine line between anger and frustration. Anger motivates; frustration hinders.

Doncic put himself in position to lose Game 3 with dumb, obvious fouls on Derrick White and Payton Pritchard, fouls that superstars can’t afford to rack up:

Then, with five violations, he tried to draw a charge above the three-point line — a play that seldom works that high up the court — and cursed at the bench to challenge the blocking call, as if it were the coach’s fault (or the refs’) that he keeps putting himself in sticky situations.

It’s not about being right or wrong; it was a close play. The best players simply cannot put themselves into a bang-bang play with four minutes left, a 50/50 proposition at best (and this wasn’t at best). This was Dallas’ last hope, and it was extinguished right then and there.

Coach Jason Kidd has called Doncic out publicly and privately, and he’s far from the only one in the Mavs organization to do so. The media certainly loves to poke at Doncic’s foibles, sometimes to his face. The superstar has even admitted it’s a problem, but he’s done nothing to address it.

Luckily, Doncic doesn’t have to look far to see an example of someone who followed a similar path. Nikola Jokic displayed many of the same characteristics when he was younger: an unusual NBA body, constant complaints, and a tendency towards infantile frustration fouls. In Jokic’s case, the fouls were a bigger issue than the complaining, because frustration hits differently — literally — when you’re seven feet tall and 260 pounds. His turning point came when he responded to provocation by blindsiding Markieff Morris, knocking him out for nearly 60 games.

That injury, plus the team’s frustrating, injury-plagued playoff losses, caused Jokic to look inward. The dangerous cheap shots (mostly) disappeared, and the complaining to refs subsided (to an extent). He lost weight and started trying on defense. Jokic couldn’t swat shots like most centers, but he used his quick hands and smarts to terrorize passing lanes and ensure he was never out of position. He maximized his body, which allowed him to unleash his mind. It’s not a coincidence that an improved Jokic led Denver to a dominant NBA Finals victory last season.

Doncic can do this, too. He’ll never be a Boy Scout on the court, but he has to sand off the roughest edges. No more abandoning teammates to defend 4-on-5 to yell in vain at an official who can’t and won’t change the call. No more stupid backcourt fouls when he didn’t get a whistle he didn’t deserve anyway. No more shower curtain impersonations on defense.

Doncic is already one of the greatest offensive players of all time, a proven killer in the regular season and playoffs. It’s easy to look at the performance of Doncic’s teammates and conclude that Doncic isn’t the problem. Doncic is good enough to win a championship right now; if he had a cast around him like the Celtics have built around Jayson Tatum, is there doubt he’d be winning this series?

But this isn’t a world of what-ifs. Doncic might never again have a team as talented as the one around him now, and while they have failed him (it sure would be nice if a Maverick could hit a three-pointer), he has failed them, too.

Anyone can pretend they are a cutthroat killer when the ball is in play. Everyone wants to win and hates to lose when the lights are on. But true competitiveness isn’t displayed in public; it’s not limited to 48-minute increments sprinkled throughout the fall and spring. It’s in the long hours in the offseason, the early-morning workouts and late-night film sessions. If Doncic is half the competitor he acts (I truly believe he is), he’ll use this summer to come back stronger mentally and quicker defensively.

And then, the NBA is really in trouble.