We Witnessed Another Luka Masterclass: Last Night in Review
- Cian Hamell-Kelleher
- Dec 28, 2022
- 4 min read
By Cian Hamell-Kelleher
Twitter: cian_kelleher3
Tim Heitman/Getty Images North America/Getty Images
If you've checked twitter in the past 24 hours, it's likely you've seen what Dallas Mavericks star Luka Dončić did to the New York Knicks last night, but if you are only now crawling out of your cave to read this blog, first, thank you, and second, let me fill you in.
60 Points
21 Rebounds
10 Assists
These are the combined stats of Luka Dončić and Frank Ntilikina on December 27th, 2022, while playing a regular season home game versus the New York Knicks. What a revenge-game performance from Frank, huh?
Now here are Dončić's stats, separate from Ntilikina's.
60 Points
21 Rebounds
10 Assists
Hey, wait a minute. That can't be right. Poor Frank.
Luka Dončić has done it again. It seems nearly every week he's posting jaw-dropping performances, usually at the hands of a loss, but not tonight. A performance as legendary as Dončić's last night must be looked at, so without further ado.
History in Front of Our Eyes
Dončić's mesmerizing performance cannot be narrowed down to one play, but I'm going to try to do it anyway.
He converted what Bill Simmons referred to as the basketball version of an onside kick. When down two with just 4.2 seconds left, after making his first free-throw, Dončić intentionally missed the second attempt, corralled the loose board, and nailed a circus shot just before the buzzer to send the game into overtime and send himself into a dancing celebration, if that's what you want to call it.
Here is the play in reference:
3 points, 1 rebound, and 1/2 assist (I'm considering it half of an assist because Dončić successfully "passed" the ball off the rim and back to himself for the game-tying shot) all in one possession, a possession that acts as a microcosm of Dončić's game, a possession where if the stat line is multiplied by 20, we get: 60 points, 20 rebounds, and 10 assists.
A stat line like this seems other worldly, and an adjective like that is not far off. Before last night, 60 points, 20 rebounds, and 10 assists had never been achieved on an NBA court. Not even Wilt Chamberlain, Oscar Robertson, or Boston Celtics legend Jordan Crawford had put up numbers like that before in a single game. (Crawford dunked on LeBron at a camp in Akron, Ohio in 2009 where at the time he was a guard at Xavier University. Nike supposedly got the video scrubbed from the internet at the time because organizers of the event claimed they would give any player that dunked on him $500 and according to an article from opencourt-basketball.com Crawford has yet to be paid. Pay the man, Nike!).
It doesn't take advanced analytics to prove just how good of a game Dončić had in Dallas last night, and I for one am not a raving fan of basketball advanced metrics, but this truly encapsulates his performance.
One of the Greatest We've Ever Seen
According to the advanced metric "Game Score" which, in a brief synopsis, takes into account a player's full box score to evaluate how good of a game they had, where 10 is average, 20 is above average, and 40 is extraordinary, Dončić posted a 56.3, good enough for 5th since the 1983-84 season, the first in which the metric is used, trailing only Michael Jordan (64.6), Kobe Bryant's 81-point game (63.5), Karl Malone (👎 60.2), and James Harden (56.6). Now let's put it into perspective just how historic Dončić's performance was last night.
Since the 1983-84 season there have been:
40 Seasons
44,711 Games Played
Roughly 983,642 individual performances (an estimated average of 11 players per team each game)
30 performances with a Game Score of 50 or higher
5 performances with a Game Score of 56 or higher
Last night, Dončić found himself in the elite company of the top 5/983,642, or for all you decimal-heads out there, 0.000508% of performances in the last 40 seasons of the NBA.
Dončić isn't the only player to post a top 10 Game Score performance this season, however, as Joel Embiid of the Philadelphia 76ers posted a 54.4 Game Score with his absurd 59/11/8/7 performance against the Utah Jazz on November 13th, 2022.
There is also reason to consider this game one of the greatest comebacks of the last two decades in the NBA.
I mean good lord, Luka. Could you have a better day? Well, I guess one thing would make it better.
Get This Man His Beer
After the game, Dončić didn't have much to say, just one request:
"I'm tired as hell. I need a recovery beer."
How can you not love this guy?
Dončić, who despite being only 23 years-old and in his 5th season, has already made three (3) All-NBA first teams and woven his name into the rotating list of top five players in the NBA, joined by his European counterparts Nikola Jokic and Giannis Antetokounmpo. It's only a matter of time before he captures his first league MVP award and cements himself as an all-time great.
P.S.
I had to add this picture, apologies Knicks fans, but here is a roughly 12-year-old Luka Dončić:
Oh, man.
All Information Gathered from basketball-reference, nbastuffer.com, omnicalculator, and twitter.com
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