It took Michael Jordan seven seasons to win his first championship. It took LeBron James nine seasons and two fruitless trips to the NBA Finals to finally win a championship. Shaquille O’Neal lost his first finals match to a sweep. And before making a breakthrough this year, the recently crowned champion Boston Celtics fell in the Eastern Conference finals last year and in the finals in 2022.
Everyone is aware of the lesson: It almost always takes time to win the biggest prize. Not every time. nonetheless, typically. Luka Donci c’s reality is how it is. He is already among the finest players in the world, if not the best of the lot, at the age of 25. He isn’t a champion, though. Not quite yet. It shouldn’t come as a huge surprise that he will have to wait until at least 2025 to win his first championship. In this series versus the Celtics, Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks weren’t the obvious choice; one was a 50-win team that caught fire at the end of the regular season, while the other was a 64-win squad that was superior to all others right from the start. Dallas was predicted by the wise people to fall into these Dallas would fall in these finals, and that’s what happened. It ended Monday night in Boston, the Celtics winning 106-88, an 18-point margin for their record-setting 18th title.
“They’re a great team. They have been together for a long time, and they had to go through everything, so we just got to look at them, see how they play, the maturity, and they have some great players,” Doncic said when it was all over Monday night. “We can learn from that. We’ve got to fight next season.” Let’s be clear: Losing these NBA Finals should in no way be an indictment of Doncic. He could have played better, of course. Smarter at times, for certain. He spent some of the finals arguing too often with referees. He knows that. That said, letting a finals loss take anything away from the first six years of his body of NBA work would be ridiculou.
He’s scored 11,470 points so far, 15th most of anyone through their first six NBA seasons. Throw in his 3,472 rebounds and 3,317 assists, and Oscar Robertson is the only other player with such stats from Year 1 through Year 6. James came close. Jordan came close. But they didn’t have those numbers.
Although this doesn’t really need to be explained, let me say it anyway: Doncic, who has already been selected to the All-NBA first team five times, is headed straight into the Hall of Fame. “He’s performed to the best of his abilities despite the situation, which consists of injuries and other issues,” Mavericks guard Kyrie Irving stated early in the series. “He has been fully committing to it.”
