The cerebral basketball by Luka Doncic

We are missing 15 days at Christmas and we are in full frenzy gifts. There are two schools of thought on how to approach Christmas gifts: the first sees us reduce to the last second useful, such as 24 to 7 in the evening, the second instead the most intelligent and simple, buy them first and calmly. The NBA has done so, it is carried forward anticipating everything even in June and precisely on the 21st day of the 2018 draft. At 3 the Dallas Mavericks pick the Slovenian 19 year old European champion, Luka Doncic. Despite having played a crazy Euroleague winning with Real Madrid and a European as a main player also winning that with his Slovenia, not all were convinced of the impact that the comet Doncic had once landed on the planet NBA.

We had suggested in an unsuspicious time to look at every game in which the native talent of Ljubljana would have come on the field, because what Luka does on the 28 meters could be unrepeatable. It's not the figures that impress, its 18.2 average does not surprise me at all. What makes Doncic a real unicum in the history of the NBA is that a European basketball player, so young, did not need the "adaptation period" to be decisive for himself and his team.

Coach Rick Carlisle immediately gave Luka Doncic the responsibilities that are usually entrusted to a veteran, one like Harrison Barnes (NBA champion with the Golden State Warriors) so to speak, and instead is the 19 year old Slovenian who has the ball in hand in moments decisive and demonstration of all this is the match of the other night against the Houston Rockets and precisely the last 3 minutes with the Mavericks below 8.

Luka places a partial 11-0 practically alone and wins the game. The case is closed .
Doncic is a player who passes once every 25 years and I repeat, technically it does not surprise me at all given what I saw him doing with the Real Madrid shirt.

I read about comparisons with Drazen Petrovic, I read about explosive gaps, I read about everything and we are only at the second month of life for Luka in his new home, the NBA. I believe that more simply Doncic associates with the talent that mother nature has given him, to which his hand has evidently escaped, a "cerebral" basketball. Doncic is absolutely aware of his qualities in attack and above all knows very well how to use them. He has already done it at the highest levels and simply repeats what he has learned in Euroleague and his national team and he does it in a systematic and continuous way. This highlights two things: the first is that he was lucky enough to end up in a team that gives him the opportunity to have an important space (in NBA it is VERY IMPORTANT); the second is the empirical demonstration of the intelligence and cerebral strength that the boy from Ljubljana has had since he was 15 years old. 

One who at that age seems Dejan Bodiroga does not need any kind of endorsement, for now we are only scraping the surface of a 19-year-old boy / player who will have to work a lot on all aspects of his game and the margins of improvements are incredible . We'll be back to talk about it for sure when he has put a lot 'of mileage in the legs, for now we do the right thing to do, let's just enjoy it. Halleluka!