Luka Doncic And the Prevailing Power of the Pass

[SleepingHero]

Harden ball (now Luka ball) is a terrible brand of basketball.  Sure Luka has nice stats, but I agree it's not championship basketball.  It's hard to watch someone pound the rock for 20 seconds before a play is made.  Luka is a great player, but Mavs need to get him in check.

I think you and I differ here. 

Harden ball, for as much as we all loathed watching it, was one of the most effective offenses of all time. They took the greatest team of all time to 7 games and were 1 average shooting night away from advancing to the finals. In fact the Harden Rockets were the only team that came anywhere close to beating the healthy GSW with KD.

But Luka ball isn't Harden ball. Luka doesn't rely nearly as much on getting to the FT line as Harden did (harden was fouled more per min than prime Shaq to put it into perspective). Luka is also more efficient from the field to make up for his lack of FT shooting. 

Despite this, Luka ball is also one of the most efficient offensive creators the league has seen. He is scoring an absurd 34 ppg on 50% shooting. That is good offense by any measure. My main point of this post though, was to show that a key facet of Luka's offense (his pass), seems to be withering away in favor of isos. Whether this be a one off thing, or a Kidd not being able to create on offense, I don't know. But this team can only go so far if Luka can't recognize the game within the game and get others involved. 

He's never really had an issue doing this before, and it was quite obvious he was hampered against the Suns. I trust Luka will make the adjustments. Hopefully Kidd sees and recognizes this as well.