It’s interesting to consider when, exactly, Luka Doncic knew that he had the Wolves beat. Maybe it was when Jaden McDaniels allowed himself to be screened away in the final seconds, leaving Rudy Gobert to contain Doncic all on his own. “He got a great switch on Rudy,” Kyrie Irving said, “and I know exactly what he was thinking.” Or maybe Doncic knew it was over when he clocked Gobert shading his left side, playing him for history. When Luka steps back into a 3, he almost always steps back to his left—a signature move that netted what was, until Friday night, the biggest shot of his career.
By the time Gobert stepped out to meet Doncic on the perimeter, Luka had already hit three stepback 3s on the night, all to his left. So he sold Rudy one more, baiting the Defensive Player of the Year into a moment of overreaction. “When he got to dancing with Gobert, you could see that the stepback was coming,” Mavericks head coach Jason Kidd said. Just not in the direction Gobert expected. And maybe that was it—that as soon as Gobert lurched forward, he had already lost. Doncic took one hard step inside the arc to force Gobert into a kind of a frantic recovery, and then launched himself backward and to his right, against the grain of the scouting report.
That must have been the moment. Or maybe Luka didn’t know for sure until the ball left his fingertips, perfectly on line and on target in the highest-stakes moment of his NBA career. Dereck Lively, who had screened for Doncic on the play to set up the mismatch, said that he can always tell if Luka’s stepback will fall based on how he lands. If Doncic comes down hopping on one foot, the shot is as good as made. “I saw it go up,” Lively said. “I saw how he landed. He had a pep in his step, so I knew it was good.” And boy, was it:
Yet Doncic couldn’t have been absolutely certain that his shot would go until it cleared through the net, finishing off a massive comeback to give Dallas a 109-108 victory and a 2-0 series lead. Once the shot dropped, however, the Target Center went silent, and Doncic made sure to let Gobert and everyone in attendance know that Minnesota’s defensive captain, respectfully, can’t fucking guard him. “I didn’t say that,” Doncic said, before breaking out in a wry smile. “I was speaking Slovenian.” Whatever the language, it’s a sentiment that Doncic has shared with Gobert before—an echo of the way Luka once embarrassed the Jazz so badly in the playoffs that Utah blew up its roster and traded Gobert to the Timberwolves.
The matchup with Gobert has always suited him. There’s something clearly personal there, enough to bring some added edge to a postseason-altering shot and further strain French-Slovenian basketball relations in the process. “But it’s not even that,” Lively said. “Who doesn’t he wanna go at?” No player in basketball seems to relish embarrassing bigs quite like Luka. It’s his most ruthless quality; any 7-footers who take the floor against the Mavs have to make their peace with the fact that they will be lured out to the perimeter, they will be taken out of their element, and—in all likelihood—they’ll meet a similar fate to Gobert. Luka can destroy any mismatch. He can also engineer those mismatches more consistently than any other creator in the league, coaxing switches even out of defenses that have no intention of playing his game. It takes an unbelievably refined scorer to manufacture the kind of space that Doncic did against Gobert. But it took something else entirely to get the Mavs within range to win this game in the first place.
Before Luka decided Game 2 with a stepback, he decided how it would be played. He set the terms of engagement. He picked out which Wolves he wanted in the action and called them forward. He dissected Minnesota’s entire scheme of help defense, selling would-be plays with his eyes before throwing blind feeds to Lively and Daniel Gafford for easy scores. Switching against Luka is a doomed errand, but the Wolves did it anyway on that final possession because Luka’s playmaking demanded it. Giving up the 3 in the end was a total disaster, the kind of mistake that could wind up costing Minnesota its season. Yet a great defender and an elite team defense fell into that sort of mistake because they couldn’t afford to let Doncic (who finished with 32 points, 13 assists, and 10 rebounds) pick them apart the way he did for the entire second half.
“Some of the greatest scorers to play this game—or the greatest offensive threats—have been able to play that in-between game,” Irving said. “They’ve been able to make plays for others. And when they figure out how to make their teammates better, they become that much greater.”
History will remember the stepback, but as they were trying to defend it, the Wolves remembered the perfect reads, the incomprehensible passes, and the deconstruction of their basic defensive principles. “I thought [Luka] set him up for the stepback because of him attacking the paint over and over,” Kidd says. “Rudy has to honor that.” Just prior to Luka’s game-winner, Gobert held his own on a similar switch against Doncic by shading his left side to take away the stepback. And it worked—Luka responded by attacking the paint for a tough fadeaway, setting the expectation that he might do it again. The trap was set. It didn’t matter that Doncic hadn’t made a single shot in the fourth quarter to that point; the Wolves had seen everything that he was able to engineer and had felt their lead (once as much as 18 points) slip away under the weight of it. Anthony Edwards is a sensational talent feeling his way through a fast and complicated game. Doncic, however, is actively changing that reality until it suits him.
That’s not the only difference between these two teams, but it’s a fundamental one. Dallas has now won the first two games of the Western Conference finals by four total points. The margins in the playoffs can be achingly small, decided less by crunch-time heroics than by how consistently a team can get into a comfortable flow. Luka helps the Mavs start as many possessions as possible with a winning premise. Sometimes it’s a mismatch, like Doncic and Gobert. Often, it’s just rearranging something as simple as how Dallas is spacing or who, exactly, is coming up to screen. When Luka calls for a pick, he’ll sometimes use his off hand to almost swipe through his options, waving off teammates who might complicate the play and gesturing toward others to sprint into position. He doesn’t always know how a play will end, but he knows how it should begin.
“I don’t decide what I’m gonna look [for] before the play,” Doncic said. “I just see what the defense gives me.” That was true even in the endgame, after 41 minutes of teasing apart every variation in Minnesota’s coverage to clinical precision. “I told D-Live, come [screen] and we’ll just figure it out from there.” And they did, all game long, laying the groundwork for the eventual finishing blow. A defense can take away the corners or the roll man, but generally not both—unless they’re bold enough to switch. The game was sealed on a stepback, but it was probably won on some fairly ordinary possession in the second half, when Luka’s passing stretched the Wolves a bit too thin and nudged them toward more desperate measures. Maybe Doncic knew, even then, that he had Minnesota’s number. Maybe he knew then what we all know now: that no defender on the floor, award-winning or otherwise, has it in their power to stop him.