Luka Dončić drives himself to work.
This revelation about the 26-year-old Los Angeles Lakers star was gleaned during a recent visit to his new place of employment, where he cruised out of Crypto.com arena in a black Cadillac Escalade after earning a slice of revenge against his old Dallas Mavericks team last Tuesday. I have no idea how many superstars get behind the wheel on the way to the office, but something was surprising about seeing him making that left turn onto Chick Hearn Court as he headed off into the night.
About last night…
Luka (in the Escalade) drives off, while his Slovenian supporters say their goodbyes. Kyrie, meanwhile, had just left the arena in a golf cart heading to the nearby hotel. What a surreal scene.
My updated view of the deal that didn’t need to go down, at… pic.twitter.com/2dUyOwvoaX
— Sam Amick (@sam_amick) February 26, 2025
Kobe Bryant used to arrive in a helicopter. Private drivers are a regular thing in the NBA. But here was Dončić, whose previous employers are so convinced that he’ll eventually break down, navigating the Los Angeles highways like an everyman not long after he was given the keys to the Lakers kingdom.
It’s still early, a little more than a month since this stunning deal went down, but he’s looking quite capable of steering this storied franchise so far.
This latest Dončić outing was the best of his nine games in his new purple-and-gold digs, a 30-point, 15-assist, eight-rebound performance in Tuesday’s 136-115 win against New Orleans that gave the Lakers (39-21) their seventh consecutive win and improved their standing to second in the Western Conference. They’re now 7-2 with Dončić since his stunning arrival more than a month ago — not too shabby considering his shot has been off for much of his early Lakers tenure.
As our John Hollinger wrote on Monday, the Lakers are looking more and more like legitimate contenders.
Dončić made a bit of history along the way in this one, joining LeBron James, Jerry West and Magic Johnson as the only Lakers to have a 30-point, 15-assist game in the regular season or playoffs (per Stathead.com, Johnson did it 22 times, West nine, and James one).
“Luka has been with the team for about an hour, and he joins that group,” Lakers commentator Bill Macdonald joked on the broadcast.
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James had himself a night, too, becoming the first player to score 50,000-plus points (regular season and playoffs combined) while finishing with 34 points, eight rebounds, six assists and two blocks. He and Dončić became the first duo in franchise history to record 30-plus points and five-plus 3-pointers (James was 5-of-10 and Dončić was 6-of-13).
Just take a quick look at the balance between these two all-time greats.
• James (reminder: he’s FORTY years old): 27.2 points (53.4 percent overall on 18.9 attempts per; 40.5 percent from 3 on 7.4), 9.2 rebounds, 6.2 assists.
• Dončić: 22.9 points (40.1 percent on 18 attempts per; 30.1 percent from 3 on 9.2), 8.2 rebounds, 7.7 assists.
So, yes, in other words, the time has officially come to recant my previous stance that the fit between these two was “not great.”
There are always receipts on social media, where the notifications started lighting up late Tuesday night when folks began retweeting, and chastising, my appearance on NBA TV not long after the deal went down. Rightfully so.
In my defense, though, the great Charles Barkley had the same concerns about these two ball-dominant legends finding a way to make it work. And since misery loves company, I’m inviting Chuck to this pity party.
Second, there’s some context here that is worth revisiting, which might help explain my skeptical mood at the time. As I wrote on Feb. 2, Lakers owner Jeanie Buss was not enjoying the dynamic between the organization and her team’s top two stars from Klutch Sports, James and Anthony Davis, before the trade changed everything. There was the Jan. 22 ESPN report indicating that James and Davis were “growing concerned” about the Lakers’ ability to upgrade the roster, followed by the on-camera interview that Davis granted to the network in which he openly expressed his frustrations about having to play center (he has long preferred power forward). Buss shared her candid view of it all in an interview with NPR this week.
“We’re happy we have him,” Buss said of Dončić. “We have lost the last three years in a row to the Denver Nuggets in the playoffs, and we really didn’t have anything (on the roster) that was going to look different going into the playoffs again. Anthony Davis was complaining about where he was being played, and he wasn’t happy. So I think this was a positive for both teams.”
So … what does this have to do with LeBron and how he might fit with Dončić?
It’s nuanced, but here’s the answer: At that time, it wasn’t clear just yet how James might react to his close friend and co-star being shipped out of town in exchange for a younger star with a similar skill set who would instantly become the most important player in the Lakers’ program. There were signs of strain in this partnership between James and the Lakers, with questions looming about whether either party would want to continue beyond this summer if there was no real hope in sight. It was fair to wonder how James might handle this new chapter ahead.
As we now know, James has decided to embrace Dončić in the kind of whole-hearted way that could create one of the most entertaining and unique dynamic duos the game has ever seen. Not only is James somehow playing at an MVP-caliber level at this unprecedented late stage, but he’s meshing with Dončić as well as anyone could have imagined. The credit should be shared, to be sure, but first-year Lakers coach J.J. Redick and his well-respected staff deserve a major hat tip for the part they’ve played in making this work in the early going.
“(With) LeBron, it’s big-time of him just to kind of hand over a little bit of the ball control,” said Redick, who has two former head coaches on his bench (Scott Brooks and Nate McMillan), as well as an assistant in Greg St. Jean who was with Dončić in Dallas previously and was also on Frank Vogel’s Lakers staff when they won the title in 2020.
“We weren’t having LeBron bring it up a ton. But even in the half court, (James) just playing off ball and being comfortable with that, I think, is huge. And obviously he’s still scoring at a very high level. We’re going to get him the ball. When Luka’s not in the game, we’re going to have him as the primary guy. … But being shot-ready, all that stuff, I think, has been fantastic.”
The hope from here, as the Lakers see it, is for Dončić to continue to get comfortable while soaking up all that training knowledge from James along the way. If that happens, with Dončić becoming the Luke Skywalker to LeBron’s Yoda as he enters his prime, then my prediction that this might not work should be forever enshrined in the @oldtakesexposed vault.
At this rate, Luka and LeBron will be carpooling to Crypto before long.
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(Photo: Jae C. Hong / AP)
