Luka Doncic will make his Los Angeles Lakers debut on Monday night, which is still an incredibly weird thing to write. While it’s going to take some time for fans to make the adjustment to seeing Doncic in a Lakers uniform, he and the Lakers are hoping it’s a quicker transition to him getting comfortable on the court.
Doncic, one of the top young stars in the game, going to play with the greatest player of the previous generation in LeBron James is an incredible storyline, but the Lakers are also firmly in the mix in the West playoff race at 31-19, good for fifth right now and just a half-game behind Houston for a top-4 seed. That means there’s some pressure on this team to keep winning as Doncic gets acclimated and the Lakers get used to having a second alpha-dog in the backcourt.
The good news is, his debut is coming against the West’s second-worst team in the Utah Jazz, which should provide a pretty sizable margin for error in Doncic’s first game as a Laker. Still, there are some things we’ll be watching in his first game that will give us an idea on how quickly the Lakers can put the pieces together and hit their ceiling with this group.
How often will the Lakers put Luka and LeBron in actions together?
The biggest question when the Lakers made this trade was how Luka and LeBron will fit together. They are two of the game’s elite and have always thrived on the ball, but now will have to figure out how to maximize their partnership in a shared capacity. There’s undoubtedly a world where it works beautifully, given they are two of the NBA’s best passers, but there will be a feeling out period as they try to find where each other is most comfortable on the floor and how they can use the other to put the defense in a bind.
JJ Redick’s familiarity with Luka as his former teammate should help accelerate that process, and the thing I’ll be watching for is how often he’s putting the two into an action together. Without a dominant center on the roster (we’ll get to that more in a minute), Redick could substitute LeBron as the screener for Doncic and see if his two stars can create some quick chemistry. Beyond that, James will probably have some ideas on how to leverage their passing ability and the attention they command from defenses. In Luka’s first game on the bench watching the Lakers after being traded there, James rather famously yelled “that’s what we’re gonna do” at Luka after working a give-and-go for an and-1 bucket. That dynamic and how those two work together is the single most interesting thing about this first game against a Jazz team they should be able to overwhelm with talent, even if it takes some time to fully gel.
Luka Doncic: more willing catch-and-shoot threat?
While the sample is just 22 games, Doncic had made a pretty considerable shift in his willingness to be a catch-and-shoot threat in Dallas when he was healthy this season. For his entire NBA career, Doncic has preferred to create his own shots, even from three-point range. He operated somewhat like James Harden used to in Houston, not spotting up at the three-point line but hovering well beyond it, giving himself space to get the ball and go to work off the dribble rather than being a true catch-and-shoot threat. But this season, he was nearly 50/50 (48/52) on assisted and unassisted threes, boasting his highest rate of assisted threes of his career. As a rookie, 42.3 percent of his threes were assisted as he worked his way into being the ball-dominant force, but since his rookie year, his highest rate had been just 29.9 percent (last year).
That is a rather important development as he goes to Los Angeles and plays alongside LeBron James. While I’m excited to see what JJ Redick comes up with to put the two in actions together, leveraging their size and handling abilities, having Doncic be more of an active threat when spotting up along the perimeter is a must for working with LeBron. He’s shown more of a willingness to do that this season and I’ll be looking to see where he’s stationed when LeBron is on the ball, because to take full advantage of the gravity of having both Luka and LeBron, Doncic can’t be 8 feet behind the three-point arc while the other is going to work.
What’s the center rotation look like?
The Lakers tried to address their hole at center by trading for Mark Williams, but after the Lakers failed his physical, the trade was rescinded with Williams returning to Charlotte and Dalton Knecht coming back to L.A. That means the Lakers won’t have any major reinforcements coming at the center spot, leaving them with Jaxson Hayes and a pair of two-way guys (Christian Koloko and Trey Jemison) as their big man rotation. That’s not ideal, and on Saturday we saw the Lakers play plenty of small-ball against the Pacers (a good team to lean on small-ball lineups). However, Doncic prefers operating with a strong pick-and-roll partner, and will not really have that outside of Hayes (who is a good lob threat but a so-so screener). If Maxi Kleber were healthy, I’d anticipate he would play a lot just because of his familiarity with Doncic, but with his foot injury, there aren’t a lot of answers on this L.A. roster other than going quite small.
How Doncic fares with small-ball lineups will be fascinating to watch. I’d expect JJ Redick will lean into spacing with those groups, and I’d bet Dorian Finney-Smith is tied to Doncic’s minutes just to give him someone familiar in the lineup (and who can bolster the defensive end of the floor). Defense is the biggest concern with those small-ball groups, and while the tanking Jazz aren’t a team you worry too much about in general, they do have size and will present some problems on the glass for a very small Lakers group. In a way, they could be a good early test case for Redick with regards to his rotation against a big team without a lot of resources.
