It’s officially a new year, so what better time for our weekly Stock Watch, where we check in with the NBA and take a look at who’s rising and who’s falling.
Rising: Luka Dončić’s MVP case
The Dallas Mavericks‘ roster is, well … not great. The team’s second-best player is Christian Wood. Its third best is … Spencer Dinwiddie? It’s an embarrassment, and the Mavericks would be leading the Brick for Vic sweepstakes if not for the Luka Dončić not just playing great, but playing some of the best basketball in the history of the league.
Luka has racked up three (!) 50-point games over the past 10 days. He’s the sole reason they’ve been able to reel off seven straight wins to climb into the top five in the Western Conference standings.
For the season, Dončić is averaging a league-best 34.2 points per game — on 51.1% shooting! — to go with 8.9 assists and 8.7 rebounds. He’s become (even more) impossible to defend. He might be the league’s best finisher in the paint (he’s shooting a ridiculous 75% at the rim and 55% in the paint but outside three feet). He’s too big for guards, and enjoys bullying them with his burly frame. Big men can’t hang with his bobs and weaves and burst. He’s a brilliant passer, meaning double teams don’t work and help is often punished.
When he’s been on the court, the Mavs have outscored their opponents by 5.1 points per 100 possessions; when he sits, they’ve been outscored by 4.4.
Somebody get this man a beer!
I don’t know if Luka can keep this up. He’s playing nearly 37 minutes per game, and the nearly 10 minutes per game he has the ball in his hands is not only tops in the league, but would also be the highest mark in 10 years, which is as far back as the publicly available data goes.
It would be nice if the Mavericks could get him some help. In the meantime, let’s sit back and appreciate a maestro at the top of his craft.
Falling: Everything and everyone associated with the Minnesota Timberwolves
Even if you believe — like most did outside of Timberwolves’ HQ — that Tim Connelly, the team’s new president of basketball operations, overpaid for Rudy Gobert, I don’t think anyone thought the addition of Gobert would hurt Minnesota this year. The issues with the deal were more with how much the Wolves parted with. Not whether a three-time Defensive Player of the Year would make a 46-win team worse.
And yet, here we are in the first week of…
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