The Whiteboard: 5 crazy Luka Doncic playoff stats to blow your mind
By Ian Levy
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I first heard Luka Doncic’s name at a sports bar called The Four’s. Every year, NBA people gather there the night before the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference to socialize and talk shop. It was four or five years ago and I think Doncic was 16 at the time. I was talking with a few people about Nikola Jokic and translating statistical projections for young European players and an analytics specialist for an NBA team mentioned Doncic. I don’t remember his exact words but the gist was, for his age and level of competition, Doncic had an unheard-of statistical baseline, making him a once-in-a-generation prospect. Turns out this guy knew what he was talking about.
We’re four games into Doncic’s playoff career. Somehow we’re both in uncharted territory and left wondering how far away we still might be from his ceiling. After his game-winner to even the series with the Clippers, I went back to Doncic’s numbers and tried to find a few to capture just how otherworldly he’s been.
These Luka Doncic playoff stats will blow your mind
1. Luka Doncic is averaging 31.5 points, 10.5 rebounds, 9.8 assists and 1.5 steals per game.
Again, it’s just four games but he’s essentially averaging a triple-double against a team that has three of the best perimeter defenders in the league. (Although to be fair, Marcus Morris has been the primary Doncic defender in this series so far). His usage rate is 37.0 percent and his true shooting percentage is 62.1 percent. AND he’s missed 13 free throws! Make a few more and those numbers would be even more absurd.
2. Doncic has had a direct hand in 44.9 percent of the points the Mavericks have scored in this series.
Doncic has scored 126 points in this series and created another 93 with his assists. That’s 219 of the 494 points Dallas has scored against the Clippers. For comparison’s sake, that’s slightly more than the 43.6 percent of the Utah Jazz’s points that Donovan Mitchell has had a direct hand in.
3. By Win Probability Added, Doncic’s Game 4 was the third-best performance of the play-by-play era.
Win Probability Added is a metric that comes from Inpredictable, built off their live win probability model. By that measure his Game 4 was only topped by LeBron James games from 2006 and 2007.
4. Doncic has had the ball in his hands for 41 minutes in this series.
That’s nine minutes more than anyone else in this playoffs and about 20 percent of the title game-time in their first-round series. If we just look at the Mavericks’ time of possession, Doncic has had the ball in his hands about 48 percent of the time his team has had it. Imagine being this productive and this efficient under that workload and that level of defensive attention.
5. Doncic is making all the tough shots.
PBPStats.com has a measure called shot quality, which is basically a player’s expected effective field goal percentage on shot location, game situation and how the possession started. A lower number means a player is taking more difficult shots. Doncic’s shot quality for the playoffs is 46.0 but he’s posted an actual effective field goal percentage of 58.4, which means he’s outperforming his shot selection by 12 percentage points. In the series, 46 percent of his shots are classified as tightly or very tightly defended by the NBA’s tracking stats (which means a defender was within four feet of him). His effective field goal percentage on those shots is 61.8 percent.
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