Sports medicine experts have Luka Dončić “off the charts” in athleticism metrics. That begs the question: do we need new ways of thinking about athleticism?
But considering who’s dominating the league in scoring, topping the MVP rankings year after year and setting triple double records, maybe we should rethink this description.
Both Luka Dončić and Nikola Jokic are talked about as unstoppable scorers. Coaches are always asked how they’re going to stop one or the other, and the answer is most often something along the lines of: “We can’t” or “pray”.
Last summer, long before he became an NBA coach, JJ Redick brought this topic up on his podcast The Old Man and the Three. And that got me thinking – are we thinking about all this in the wrong way?
What if the reason these two players are dominating in the best basketball league in the world is exactly that – because they’re elite athletes? They’re competing against the best, right?
Redick brought this up after he had listened to another podcast, Tom Haberstroh’s Basketball Illuminati. Here, Haberstroh talked to Dr. Marcus Elliott, founder and director of the Peak Performance Project (P3). The P3 facilities have assessed two thirds (64 percent) of current NBA players (as of January 2023, when the podcast aired) and have accumulated data on NBA players for over ten years.
And Dr. Marcus Elliott, who is a sports medicine specialist, presented a completely different way of looking at athleticism than the norm still to this day. When asked who was the most impressive athlete they had assessed, someone who people may not see as athletic, Dr. Marcus Elliott plainly answered: Luka Dončić.
Traditionally, we view athletes as someone who runs fast and jumps high. But there are so many metrics that are more interesting and more predictive of success.
“Luka jumps lower than your average NBA guard. He doesn’t jump very high, he doesn’t run very fast. But he stops better than almost any other athlete we’ve ever assessed.”
Only one player had ever scored higher than Luka Dončić on the breaking (often referred to as deceleration) metrics:
“James Harden at his peak was the best breaker we’ve ever assessed in the NBA.* And Luka, as an 18 year old, had the second highest metrics as a breaker.
“We thought he was an incredible athlete, he just looks kinda doughy and slow, but he’s an amazing athlete.”
At the P3 facilities, they have thousands of data points about how athletes move, land, change directions and slide, as just some of the examples. And these indicate, once again, that the best and most successful athletes are not the ones that run the fastest and jump the highest.
Nikola Jokic, another superstar who’s not regarded as a very gifted athlete, popped on all metrics when he was assessed
“Jokic has the lowest vertical jump of any NBA player we’ve ever assessed, about 980. But his movement quality is really, really high.”
Jokic is what they call an “enigmatic mover”, basically like a Swiss Army knife, Dr. Elliott said. “He has the right answer for every job from a movement standpoint.”
Dr. Elliott also made a point out of saying that the league is getting more and more athletic: “We can go back ten years and the athletes today are so much better. That’s especially true for the bigger athletes.”
For a long time, it has baffled basketball fans that these two players, who are considered “unathletic” and by some are described as being out of shape and slow, seem to be unstoppable.
The numbers, data points and metrics by these experts, however, clearly paints a different picture. And as the league is getting more athletic, these guys just consistently keep breaking records.
It all points to the fact that we’ve been looking at this all wrong from the beginning. The idea has been that fancy dunks were the predictor of athleticism.
But Dr. Marcus Elliott and his colleagues’ work brings serious doubt to that idea. It may be time that we start thinking and talking about athleticism in a completely different way.
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