What Does Luka Doncic Say to the NBA Offseason? “Not Today.”

Luka Doncic responded to his critics. The result was the third-largest victory in NBA Finals history.

It’s possible that in his entire career, the 25-year-old five-time All-NBA honoree had never been the subject of such censure as he was after Game 3 of the Finals. Doncic fouled out with 4:12 remaining in that contest, scored 27 points on 27 shots, and played matador defense against the Celtics’ drive-and-kick attack. He watched crunch time from the bench as Boston took a 3-0 lead on Dallas’s home floor, to all but clinch a championship.

“His defensive performance is unacceptable,” ESPN’s Brian Windhorst said after the game, with representative vitriol. “He is a hole on the court. The Celtics are attacking him; they are ahead in the series because they have attacked him defensively. … He is costing his team.”

That’s not the typical way pundits speak about Doncic, one of the best young players in NBA history. Luka missed the playoffs as a rookie, but no matter—he was a near-unanimous Rookie of the Year with a brilliantly bright future. In his second and third seasons, he lost close series to the Clippers, but excelled in defeat with both outstanding numbers and momentous highlights.

In his fourth season, Doncic overachieved by reaching the conference finals with a no. 4 seed, engineering a historically lopsided upset along the way. In his fifth season, the Mavericks missed the playoffs again—but Luka still made First Team All-NBA and received MVP votes, as the discourse surrounding the team was more about their (initially) ineffectual trade for Kyrie Irving and late-season swerve into a tank. And in his sixth season, Luka reached the Finals to further his burgeoning legend.

But then came the Finals and a 3-0 deficit against a deeper, more complete Celtics squad. No team in NBA history has overcome such a rotten start to win a playoff series—though the Mavericks are one step along that untraveled path, after a 122-84 blowout win in Game 4. Doncic scored 29 points, including 25 in the first half, while no Celtic tallied more than 15 points in the entire game.

Offense has never been the question with Luka, even against the best, most locked-in playoff defenses. He is, quite simply, one of the greatest statistical performers in postseason history. Among qualifying players on the Basketball Reference leaderboards, Luka ranks second in career playoff scoring (31 points per game), behind only Michael Jordan. In the advanced stat box plus-minus, Luka ranks fourth in offensive impact; the other players in the top five have combined for 15 championships and 12 Finals MVP awards.

Career Playoff Leaders

But Windhorst et al. weren’t referring to Doncic’s offensive output with their barbs after Game 3. It was his effort on the other end.

The Mavericks don’t need Jrue Holiday–level defense from Doncic on the perimeter. Because of his offensive burden, Luka typically guards the opposition’s weakest scorer, and because of Luka’s playmaking ability, the Mavericks are able to sacrifice offense at other positions to surround him with defense-first wings like Derrick Jones Jr. It’s a lineup with perfect harmony, most of the time.

But the Celtics’ five-out attack, with no weak points on which to stash Luka, strained that setup past its breaking point. Luka was the main target as Boston got its drive-and-kick machine whirring—marking the most extreme manifestation of a postseason-long trend. As ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne wrote after Game 3: “According to Second Spectrum, Doncic has allowed the three highest blow-by percentages on drives in a playoff series in the past 10 years. In the first round, the L.A. Clippers drove past him 65.2 percent of the time. In the second round, the Oklahoma City Thunder blew past him on defense 59 percent of the time. Against the Celtics, that percentage has ballooned to 67.7 percent.”

Luka is listed at 6-foot-7 and 230 pounds; this isn’t the case of a short, slight point guard like Trae Young struggling on defense. Point guards are rarely the best players on NBA champions—Steph Curry is arguably the only exception in decades—because it’s typically too easy to gameplan against and pick on them over a long series. But by size alone, Luka isn’t like most point guards; he should at the very least be able to serve as an acceptable, rather than a disastrous, defender.

And in Game 4, he did, as a spirited Mavericks team sprinted past a Celtics squad seemingly moving at half speed. Give Luka credit, even if the adjustment might be too little, too late to matter for the ultimate outcome of the series:

But here’s the strange part. Luka was never the main problem in the Mavericks’ earlier losses in the Finals, even when his defensive effort waned. In his so-called “unacceptable” Game 3, Dallas actually outscored the Celtics by nine points when Luka was on the court; they lost only because they fell apart without him (and because they were without him longer than expected, thanks to a sixth foul).

Through the first three games of the Finals, the Mavericks had a point differential of negative-four in 118 minutes with Doncic on the court, versus negative-28 in 26 minutes without him. Both the Dallas offense and—more surprisingly—defense cratered when Luka reached the bench.

Mavericks With and Without Luka Doncic Through Three Finals Losses

Don’t read too much into the gap in defensive ratings, which is largely the result of flukish shooting luck. Through the first three Finals games, Boston made just 31 percent of its 3-pointers with Luka on the court, versus 48 percent with him off.

But these data points do show that Luka wasn’t the primary problem as Dallas fell behind. Rather, the key issue was a lack of contributions from Luka’s teammates—both role players and costar Kyrie Irving—as the Mavericks held Boston to 107, 106, and 105 points but never reached 100 themselves. And it’s overwhelmingly obvious that Dallas’s offense collapsed without its primary playmaker and scorer.

That wasn’t the case in Game 4, as the Mavericks matched greater energy on the defensive end with a more well-rounded offensive approach. Led by Luka, five Mavericks scored in double figures—several reached that threshold in the blowout’s extended garbage time—and the team sank 15 3-pointers, after making only 22 combined across the first three games.

Whether that turnaround continues into Game 5 in Boston remains to be seen; it’s possible that Kristaps Porzingis’s continued absence gives the Mavericks the boost they need to make this series competitive. Without Porzingis, the Celtics don’t have quite the floor spacing on offense or rim protection on defense that makes them so formidable when they’re in peak form.

Or it’s also possible that Game 4 represented one last gasp of life from the underdog, and one last gift for Mavericks fans in return for their support along this magical playoff run. This contest was reminiscent of the same juncture in the 2017 Finals. In that series, the favored Warriors won the first two games at home, then took a tight Game 3 in Cleveland; they had a chance—just like the 2023-24 Celtics—to become the first team in league history to sweep both the conference finals and Finals. But the Cavaliers ran away with Game 4 at home, before ultimately succumbing as the Warriors clinched the title at home in Game 5.

That end result might well arrive in Boston on Monday; in fact, it’s the most likely outcome at this point. But if the Celtics clinch the gentleman’s sweep and their record 18th title, it won’t be Luka’s fault.