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Lakers coach JJ Redick was stumped.
He had recently likened Luka Dončić to a supernova. He said you have to pick your poison against him.
So, when asked if he had any superlatives to offer following Dončić’s 53-point, five-rebound, five-assist performance in the Lakers’ 124-118 win over the Trail Blazers on Friday, Redick stumbled.
“Sure,” Redick said. “Sure.”
When a reporter started asking another question, he interjected.
“I’m going to just sit around, we’ll gather one day and come up with more superlatives,” Redick added. “So I’ll have more words ready. But for now, I don’t have any words.”
The hyper-prepared Lakers coach was finally ill-prepared for an assignment.
Redick isn’t the only person who has been left dumbfounded following Dončić’s blazing start to the season in which he’s averaging a league-leading 40.1 points, 7.7 rebounds and 7.6 assists.
In Friday’s game, Dončić passed Michael Jordan (347) for the most points scored in the first nine games of a season since the NBA-ABA merger with 361 points.
It’s the most points anyone has scored in the modern NBA since Wilt Chamberlain in 1962-63.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” Dončić said. “Obviously playing basketball, it’s a lot of fun for me. It’s more [fun] when you play like this and when you win games. So, it’s been like this my whole life. Basketball was my dream. Playing in the NBA was my dream. Just living my dream.”
The Lakers are living theirs, too.
The 27-year-old face of their franchise is having an MVP-caliber campaign while leading the Lakers to the No. 1 seed in the Western Conference with an 8-2 record.
No one expected the Lakers to be this good.
And no one expected Dončić to soar to the top of the MVP conversation after he hadn’t finished in the top two in voting ever in his career.
But if the first few weeks of the season have made anything clear, it’s that Redick needs to beef up his vocabulary. He needs to get a thesaurus. Dončić is skyrocketing, and he’s carrying the Lakers with him.
There were many incredible moments in the Lakers’ 16-point come-from-behind win over the Trail Blazers in which they stormed back after shooting 4-for-23 from beyond the arc in the first half, including missing all 15 of their initial attempts from that distance.
There was the buzzer-beating 62-foot shot that Dončić made at the end of the second quarter, a shot he literally banked in from three-quarters of the court.
“Luka can do some things that maybe a handful, if not no one, can do in basketball,” Redick said.
Things only got more fun from there.
There was a little mixup after Dončić notched his 11th 50-point performance in his career, surpassing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar for 10th-most such games in NBA history.
It all started because Ziaire Williams couldn’t wait to congratulate Dončić.
So much so that Williams decided to interrupt what he thought was Dončić’s walk-off television interview with “NBA on Prime” by approaching him from behind, putting his hands on his shoulders and yelling, “Fifty ball.”
Only, there was a problem.
Austin Reaves was doing the interview. Not Dončić.
“I’m the wrong white person,” said Reaves, who had 25 points.
Did Williams seriously confuse his two teammates? “Deadass,” he said, flashing a smile in the Lakers’ locker room.
Dončić got in on the fun, too.
“That was very disrespectful to me,” Dončić said jokingly of being confused with Reaves, with whom he shares a brotherly bond.
It has been a wild stretch for Dončić, who’s shattering records nightly.
He’s leaving his coach at a loss for words. He’s making shots from outer space. And he’s leaving his teammates seeing his face in everyone.
So, only one question remains.
Can Dončić keep this up?
“I feel like that,” he said. “But as long as we win, I’m good.”
