Before Wednesday’s game 5 between the Mavericks and Thunder, I was trying to wrap up a little examination piece about Luka Doncic and his tumultuous relationship with the NBA referees
. I couldn’t manage to complete my thoughts on it in time, which is fortunate because I was gifted with more time and more material to ruminate on. Four days later, Dallas has dispatched OKC and the Timberwolves sent the Nuggets home in a road Game 7. These next several paragraphs were written for an unused piece about Doncic’s acrimonious relationship with the referees of the NBA. They still work with what I wanted to explain further…
It seems as if the time has come and gone for the Dallas organization, coaching staff, et al, to help its young star Luka Doncic understand that the dynamics between NBA players and NBA referees is such that his unceasing belligerence towards them during play could be increasingly detrimental to his team as they attempt to advance in the playoffs.
Referees are humans, and although they’ve made a pledge to be professional and unbiased, there’s no doubt they struggle to remain disinterested when a young upstart (generational talent, though he may be) declaims profanity-laden accusations against their personal honor, waging a constant war – on live tv – to dispute their competence and credibility as workers of their trade, and doing so with such frequency as to regularly prompt even his biggest fans to raise their eyebrows at his need to instigate dramatics over even well-refereed plays. As an aside, we can discuss the frequent, dead-on accuracy of his assessment of their competence at another time. Right now, we’re talking about law and order (appearances).
As mentioned by another Mavs Money Ball contributor in an insightful and thoughtful article about how Luka’s on-court behavior towards the referees is very in keeping with the sporting traditions seen in The Balkans, it must not be overlooked that, off the court, Doncic never strays from presenting himself with a maturity and composure more typically befitting of a person much older than himself. In almost every aspect, he exudes the personal self-discipline and good-natured energy of an Eagle Scout, and he often makes a point to display a reverence for the game’s traditions in the US and its specific history and achievements.
Like all athletes, however, what he wants more than anything is to win at the highest level; and like all humans, he has trouble controlling his emotions when his objective isn’t being realized. Doncic is 25 years old. Few of us, if any, upon attaining various levels of quasi-maturity gained in adulthood, can maintain that our decisions at 25 were informed more by the governance of reason than by hormones. Far fewer of us can boast that at that time in our lives we were so damn good at something that our ability was recognized as being one of the top 3 or so in the entire world. In a league where posturing has grown increasingly exaggerated and affected both on and off the court – which is not unaligned with popular culture and functions as entertainment – Doncic has always had a preference for utilizing referees as the unfortunate subjects for his particular brand of goading, occasionally putting them to use as his whipping boy when things aren’t going well (though typically only after they’ve made enough questionable calls to warrant it). Unfortunately, the disputes that he engages them in are too often excessive by the sheer fact that they are not beneficial to anyone. As a spectator and a fan, it pains me to see that Luka is generally the person who suffers the most as a result of his griping. As the game wears on, the bitterness between him and the referees almost always appears to take a toll on his mental energy, not to mention the fact that it surely decreases the amount of pleasure he derives from playing the game.
That was only about half of what was written (the half that wasn’t total crap). Imagine my surprise when Doncic showed up to game 5 (and then 6) and played like he’d been visited by Clarence Odbody (or his Slovenian guardian angel), fully zeroed in on the game and displaying a checked impulse in his tendency to engage the referees. I can tell you with certainty that they missed calls during both games; he just didn’t let their performance as referees disturb his focus, mental stability, or love of the game. He played with poise, and he put on a show, taking his team first to a 3-2 series lead, and then the series clincher on Saturday as the Mavs are now set to compete in the Western Conference Finals for the second time in three years.
As a Dallas fan, it’s easy to see how fortunate their organization is to have such a rare, young talent. I also feel like Luka is constantly being unfairly scrutinized because somewhere deep in our collective Puritanical unconscious, we feel entitled to disparage and discredit behavior that doesn’t run parallel to our expectations. It’s everyone; the fans, the press. People are foaming at the mouth to discuss reasons why he isn’t good enough or how he is letting basketball take a back seat to theater. Somehow, I doubt it’s truly because they’d rather see him succeed. (It’s easy to dislike a player that routinely dismantles whatever team you happen to root for).
This feels like familiar territory. If any current player knows what it’s like to be hated for being himself, it’s probably Kyrie Irving. I didn’t develop an appreciation for his personality until the latter part of the regular season this year; his addresses to the media seem increasingly motivated by the demonstration of positivity. Like many young people that find themselves in the bright glare of the media spotlight, however, raw and arrogant, the press has had a hand in the thematic structure of his narrative, specifically in his more formative years when strong leadership and influence are absolutely vital for the validation of tact and composure in the minds of young men. Some of the more notorious media entanglements that caused so much public dissection of his character were partly – most certainly not completely – the result of shrewd inquisitions, well equipped to provoke the irascibility of youth. I’m not saying that Kyrie hasn’t made mistakes, just like we all have. It’s just that, when the desire to cast judgment outweighs the inclination to seek to understand and guide each other, the capacity for shared progress decreases in equal proportion. The narrative of a successful and intelligent young man searching for his identity and struggling to find his own voice just doesn’t sound like a revenue generator. Lately, though, it seems as if he’s been successful on that journey, a fact which should be celebrated.
While these two athletes are different people with different stories, it would seem that their experiences with the NBA have some striking similarities. Like Kyrie before him, many want to see Luka fail. They’re both cut from a different cloth than the average Joe, and their perceived differences, as such, are often exploited by people searching for the wrong story; and when that’s been told, everyone regurgitates the same critical opinion piece over and over until viewers are taught to dislike them, more than anything because they’ve been conditioned to feel that way.
Perhaps someone close to Luka said something to him before game 5 to draw his attention to the fact that he can only control what he can control. Maybe it was someone who understands what he’s going through. Whatever it was, it brought out the best in Doncic in the final two games of the series, helping to propel Dallas to the Western Conference Finals. With Luka locked in, the Mavericks seem to have a collective focus that is unprecedented for them, and formidable. The practice of commanding your attention onto what you love, rather than what you hate, is an indication of personal evolution. Luka has always found a way to evolve and advance his game upon meeting new challenges. If his latest advancement becomes a permanent addition to his repertoire, it could serve, in turn, to pacify the non-believers.
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