Los Angeles Lakers star Luka Doncic is one of the very best players in the world today, but former NBA player Rashad McCants doesn’t believe his style of play is conducive to winning. On the latest episode of Gil’s Arena, McCants fired some shots at Doncic.
“They’re gonna have to [bring in superstars] because he doesn’t play winning basketball,” McCants said. “… They’re gonna have to do what they did with LeBron [James]. They gotta stack him with superstar players to give him more of an advantage to win championships. Because the way he plays basketball is not championship basketball.”
Co-host Brandon Jennings suggested it was absurd to state Doncic doesn’t play winning basketball, as he led the Dallas Mavericks to the 2024 NBA Finals. McCants, however, doesn’t believe that proved anything, as the Mavericks lost to the Boston Celtics.
McCants isn’t the first to state that the way Doncic plays isn’t a recipe for ultimate success, and he won’t be the last. Is that a fair statement? Probably not.
Doncic is currently 26 years old, and there were plenty of all-time greats who hadn’t won it all at this age. Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Stephen Curry, and Kevin Durant are just a few examples. Jordan and Curry hadn’t even led a team to the NBA Finals by that age as the Slovenian has.
It’s hard to say whether Doncic will go on to have the kind of success that those four had, but you certainly cannot say he doesn’t play winning basketball as of now. If the five-time All-Star doesn’t come close to winning a title in the next four to five years, then it’d perhaps be fair to make a statement like that.
It’s unlikely that will happen, though, and Doncic, who is averaging 27.9 points, 8.2 rebounds, 7.7 assists, 1.8 steals, and 0.4 blocks per game in 2024-25, would be backing himself to lead the Lakers on a deep run this year itself. They have a 49-31 record and are third in the standings in the Western Conference.
The Lakers are very likely to finish as the third seed too, which means they won’t be facing the top-seeded Oklahoma City Thunder in the first two rounds. That, in turn, means you’d give them a great chance of making the Western Conference Finals.
Some would back them to beat the Thunder as well, and Doncic had eliminated them in the Conference Semifinals last year with the Mavericks. You couldn’t have imagined after that series that he would be shipped out of town less than a year later.
The Mavericks stunned the basketball world by trading Doncic to the Lakers in February. While many reasons have been floated around as to why they did it, one of them is along the lines of what McCants had to say.
The Mavericks reportedly didn’t think they could win a championship with Doncic. They didn’t believe he would make sacrifices for that, and it was one of the reasons why they chose to cut ties. Time will tell if they were right, but Doncic is certainly winning the divorce right now.
