Luka Doncic: beer, the impossible triple-double and the tattoo. LeBron James bows: «I love him»- Corriere.it

THE numbers aren’t everything in sport, but they’re worth something as well. And then, first of all, the numbers: 60 pointswhich in themselves are not an absolute record but which are worth more if you have achieved 21 field goals on 31 attemptsif you deliberately missed a free throw to grab the rebound and score the basket on the fly that counts for overtime and if those 60 points are used to win the game against the New York Knicks in overtime after you were down by 9 with 33” to go. More 21 reboundsfor a double-double that had already occurred in the history of the NBA (rarely, indeed) but achieved so far only by centers: for the first time a successful guard. Plus 10 assists, for an absolutely senseless triple-double, a 60-20-10 that is unprecedented in the league. Let’s add 23, or the years completed by Luka Doncic on February 28thand then we will have an enterprise bordering on the indecent.

«I’m very tired, I need a beer to recover»: not even Forrest Gump would have been able to conceive such a sentence at the end of the game. Doncic did it. With his eternal child smile (but isn’t he still at 23?), he liquidated in this way a performance that moved the human limits under the baskets of the NBA. Adding another record, this time collective, with his Dallas Mavericks: in the 13,884 occasions in which, in the last twenty seasons, a team had found itself down by 9 points with less than 35″ from the end, that team had never succeeded to reverse the result. Not even Wilt Chamberlain, the man of 100 points in a single game, had gone that far: «Wilt the stilt» had stopped (so to speak) at 50-20-10.

But what the numbers don’t say (even and above all in a record-breaking evening) is how Luka Doncic did nothing but indulge the his predestined path
. LeBron James, someone who knows about the predestined, had already crowned him just a couple of days ago: «I love his vision of the game, he could carry the ball in attack ten times in a row and each time propose a different solution». After last night’s record, however, he could now be moved by healthy envy. Luka would laugh about it: «Non desistas, non exieris»don’t give up, don’t give up, he keeps tattooed on his left wrist, but actually the Wonderboy of Ljubljana has practically never had to make use of this Latin motto, because his career has always been on the rise, or rather on the decline.

Too talented in these 201 centimeters by 104 kilogramsa Real Madrid that already at 18 was too tight for him and a debut in the NBA accompanied by a «Slovenian Rhapsody» composed in his honor on the notes of Queen and a competition to measure his step back, originally his trademark , today accompanied – as rightly pointed out by LeBron – by an infinite number of other offensive solutions.

In an NBA in which there seems to be no game without physicality, Doncic with his apparent slowness and not exactly dry physique, invents basketball with a very European basketball intelligence. Fans, girls and mothers like him, he loves dogs (he has three, with the favorite Gia who accompanies him on every trip), he learned the rudiments of basketball from his father Sasha, a mediocre Slovenian player, and the ability to balance in the air by mother Mirjam, a former dancer and model. AND if then he had to choose a player to inspire him, not so much for characteristics as for versatility, then he should indicate Magic Johnsona point guard who out of necessity dominated an NBA Finals playing center because Jabbar was injured.

And like Magic, Luka Doncic always laughs. Who else, after a 60-20-10 game, could have answered the question “how do you feel after this feat?” with a simple «tired, I think I deserve a beer»?