Will Luka Dončić's new look help him on the floor?
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Luca's weight loss journey was, what kind of grade would you give this?
A, B, C, D, F?
What's the grade so far for Luca's weight loss journey?
I mean, I'm gonna give it a solid B+.
Um, it's not just the weight, like, cause losing weight is one thing, but it has to be functional, right?
Like, what it actually means for his performance, and I think he does look, you know, quicker than he was, um, albeit, I don't know that he's back to being sort of the 2021 version, you know, it, you can't say that it's anything but good.
It's just for me, you know, he's not the guy that was constantly beating guys off the dribble and kind of getting them on his, on his hip and then using his strength.
It's been more of a not dribbling by guys and settling for the stepback.
And so I, I was hoping that the weight loss would bring more quicker on the ball juice that we saw previously in Luka Doni's career, and I think some of that is back.
You know, when you think about, remember the first time he played against Kawhi and Paul George in the playoffs, and those guys couldn't do anything with him.
And it's not because he was doing a bunch of stepbacks.
It's because literally he was just breaking these guys down in their primes, damn near as defenders off the dribble, and I'd like to see a little bit of that come back to Luca's game.
Yeah, I think with Luca, I mean the defense as well, of course, I mean, that's been talked about over and over again with with, with the flaws on that end of the floor, but it is interesting like when you look at the shooting frequency numbers for Luca early in his career, the first two years of his career, 29% and 33% of his shots came at the rim.
Last season, that was down to 15%.
The year before that was 18%.
And so taking more mid-range, taking a bit more three-pointers as well to your point about settling for some of the jumpers.
And to me, like I also, I think a B+ is a perfectly fair grade for what we've seen so far this offseason.
It doesn't seem like the knee contusion he had is any issue.
He practiced on Monday.
He's supposed to play on Tuesday for Slovenia.
He had 26, 5, and 5 in the first half before he got knocked out.
He did look nimble.
He looks quick.
That's what we want.
That's what we want.
And to me, it's about how do you sustain it over the course of the long season.
That's to be the big question.
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