Stop comparing people to Luka Doncic
Luka Doncic is a transcendent talent. Those don't come around too often. Let's keep that in mind when discussing this year's draft class.
This post is going to be about Luka Doncic.
It’s going to be about the people that are trying to make LaMelo Ball, or Killian Hayes, or Cade Cunningham the second coming of the Slovenian wunderkind.
And I’ll get to each and every one of them, I promise.
But first, a history lesson.
Despite what certain narratives might suggest, Dirk Nowitzki was not the first European to make it across the pond and find a level of NBA notoreity.
There was Arvydas Sabonis before him, a man that would have been a surefire NBA All-Star if he had made it stateside before he turned 30. And there was Toni Kukoc, who played alongside Michael Jordan the last three times the GOAT lifted the Larry O’Brien trophy. And there was Drazen Petrovic, and Vlade Divac, and Peja Stojakovic, and Detlef Schrempf.
All of those men, and more, found success in the NBA before Nowitzki knew there was a city named Dallas on this planet.
But none of them impacted the league the way the blonde 7-footer from Wurzburg did.
By his second season in the NBA, when he was just 21 years old, Dirk was averaging 17.5 points and shooting 38 percent from three. By the time he was 22, he was dropping 20-a-night, something that didn’t stop until he was 35 years old. He made every All-Star team from 2002 through 2012. He redefined the power forward position. He made stretch-fours a thing. The Dirk-fade is one of the iconic moves in 21st century hoop.
Those other guys may have cracked open a door for Europeans entering the league. Dirk blew those doors off the hinges.
The result?
Every tall European that was captured on camera making a shot from beyond the foul line was compared to Dirk. From Vladimir Radmanovic to Mehmut Okur to Nikoloz Tskitishvili to Andrea Bargnani*, every NBA organization was trying to find their own magisterial talent in the Europe’s backwoods.
And the media fully bought in.
Every time one of these guys was picked early in a draft, they were dubbed The Next Dirk. It’s still happening to this day. How many people called Dario Saric or Lauri Markkanen The Next Dirk in the days and weeks and months before they were drafted?
And how many have even come close to living up to that standard?
(*This might be one of my hottest takes, but there are not many people that are more unfairly slandered in the #DraftBust community than Andrea Bargnani. This dude was the No. 1 pick in the 2006 draft because two things happened:
The NBA instituted the age limit for this year’s draft, meaning that the usual crop of high school seniors that we would see put their names into the NBA draft were forced to head to college for a one-and-done season. Do you know who was the first pick in the 2007 NBA Draft? A man by the name of Greg Oden, who was widely considered the best high school prospect since LeBron James at the time. His one-and-done teammate at Ohio State? Mike Conley. That was the same year where the debate over who should be No. 1 raged between Oden and a guy they call Kevin Durant. Not sure if you’ve heard of him.
Florida won the 2006 national title, and there was buzz that Joakim Noah, Al Horford and Corey Brewer would all be picked in the top five. But none of them actually left school. All three players returned to Gainesville, Florida won a second-straight national title and the trio proceeded to hear their names called in the top nine of what turned into a loaded draft in 2007.
It wasn’t necessarily talent that made Bargnani the top pick in 2006. He went first in one of the worst drafts ever because all the guys that would have been drafted over him weren’t eligible. Adam Morrison, Tyrus Thomas and Shelden Williams all went in the top five in 2006. Bargnani? He spent a decade in the NBA, averaging 14.3 points and shooting 35 percent from three. After averaging 21.3 points and 1.7 blocks during the 2010-11 season for the Raptors, Bargnani missed 211 games due to injury over the next five years before returning to Italy.
I’m not saying this dude is a Hall of Famer or anything, but in a draft that everyone knew was bad, Bargnani turned out to be a pretty solid pro before his body failed him. If he was, say, the sixth pick — drafted behind Oden and Durant and Conley and Noah and Horford — like he should have been, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation.)
Luka Doncic and Dirk Nowitzki could not be more different in the way that they play the game of basketball.
One was a 7-footer jump shooter that was the evolutionary link between Karl Malone and Kevin Durant. The other is a kind of pudgy, 6-foot-7 point guard that was the first player to enter the league playing the role we’ve become accustomed to seeing from the likes of LeBron James and James Harden.
They both have hard names to pronounce. They both ended up in Dallas. But most importantly, they both entered the league starring in a modernized role, creating a narrative for the media-at-large to sink their teeth in to.
And this is where I make the plea: Don’t do it. Don’t make the Luka comparison. Don’t call LaMelo Ball, or Killian Hayes, or Cade Cunningham, or any tall ball-handler that can make a flashy pass out of a ball-screen the Next Luka Doncic.
Because the Next Anyone has never worked out unless the subject at hand happened to be Kobe Bean Bryant. He’s the only guy that was ever anointed the second-coming of a legend to ascend to that level.
That’s it.
Kobe.
That’s the entire list.
Point being, there is a certain caliber of human being that teenagers should just never be compared to. Back in June, I wrote a column on Emoni Bates and the danger of hype. He has been called the Next Kevin Durant since he was 14 years old. I think the more interesting guy to compare him to is Andrew Wiggins. I flesh out that thought in full in the column, but here’s a snippet:
Bates’ floor in the NBA is a bucket-getting wing. I’d be shocked if he didn’t end up averaging 20 points, if not much more, at the next level. I wouldn’t be shocked if he turned out to be a perennial NBA All-Star, either; at the very least, I don’t think anyone is going to question this kid’s killer instinct. And yes, there is a real chance that Emoni Bates is one day discussed as the best basketball player in the world.
These are all in his range of outcomes.
When you can say a 16-year old’s floor is a career-20 point scorer that is on track to earn upwards of $300-million in his NBA career, it’s clear we’re dealing with someone special.
But that’s not the way this story is going to be told. The narrative will be one extreme or the other. Either Bates lives up to the hype and enters his name in the race for the GOAT, or he’s a bust that was completely overhyped by click-bait artists trying to garner some YouTube subs.
Much of that applies here.
It’s easy to understand why Ball and Hayes will be linked with Doncic. All three played their age-18 seasons abroad as the offensive centerpiece of their club team. All three have well-deserved reputations as elite passers that thrive in ball-screens. All three will be labeled as point guards despite the fact that, physically, they don’t really fit the traditional small-ball mold.
So I get it.
But keep this in mind.
Ball was the star point guard for the Illawarra Hawks, who went 4-9 in Australia’s NBL before he went down with an ankle injury in late-November that curtailed his season:
Hayes was a ball-dominant point guard for Ratiopharm Ulm in the German Bundesliga, where he went 13-20 in 33 games for the club. He did not return for the restart of the season this summer. Ulm went 6-1 without him:
Compare that to Doncic.
As an 18-year old, he was the MVP of both the Spanish ACB and the Euroleague, which is where the best basketball in the world is played outside of the NBA. He was the most accomplished teenager in European basketball history, and the most accomplished prospect to enter the league since … I don’t even know. Maybe Duke’s Jay Williams, who turned pro after winning National Player of the Year awards in back-to-back seasons with a national title sprinkled in?
Then consider this.
Doncic is a 6-foot-7, 230-pound tank with the kind of deceleration and body control that James Harden has made famous. He’s the same size as Kawhi Leonard. He’s bigger than Klay Thompson. LaMelo is 6-foot-7 and all of, what, 185 pounds? Hayes is 6-foot-5 and looks like he weighs 160 pounds soaking wet. Doncic entered the NBA needing to work on his athleticism, but he already had the build and experience to be able to handle the physicality of playing an NBA season.
The truth is, Doncic was more or less a finished product by the time he was 18, which is something that is relatively unheard of.
Neither LaMelo nor Hayes are anywhere close to being fully developed. LaMelo cannot shoot and has yet to prove any semblance of a willingness to guard. Hayes also cannot shoot, lacks the positional versatility of the other two players and, as a southpaw, can’t go right.
If either of them match the 21.3 points, 7.8 boards and 6.0 assists that Luka averaged as a rookie, I’ll eat a shoe. Hell, I’ll give you -110 odds that they don’t get there combined next season.
Which leads me to Cade Cunningham.
For my money, Cunningham is the best prospect in the 2021 NBA Draft class mostly because he’s the kind of big, ball-dominant point guard that we’ve seen thrive in the modern NBA. And he, inevitably, will draw some of those same Luka Doncic comparisons that LaMelo Ball and Killian Hayes are currently drawing. Every big point guard that plays out of ball-screens from now until the modern NBA becomes obsolete will be compared to Luka. That’s how it works.
But even Cunningham does not belong in the same pantheon as Luka, definitely not before he’s played a single game in college.
That’s because Luka Doncic is special. The only reason that he dropped to the third pick is because there were some questions about whether his effectiveness would translate from Europe to the States. (Well, that and the fact that the Sacramento Kings are clueless.)
If I was starting an NBA franchise today, I’m not sure there is anyone that I’d rather build around than Doncic. LeBron is 35. KD is coming off of a ruptured achilles. Steph, Dame and James Harden are all on the wrong side of 30. Kawhi is 29. Giannis can’t shoot and hasn’t won anything yet. Anthony Davis can’t do it all himself when he can’t stay healthy. Zion may spend the rest of his life on a minutes restriction. I think there’s a very real chance that Luka Doncic is the face of the NBA in five years, if not sooner.
And if you’re going to put that level of expectation on anyone, you better be damn sure they already are great.
Since the entire story of the 2020 NBA Draft is that there is no one that we know is going to be great, maybe we should just leave Luka out of it.