By John Hollinger / The Athletic
Luka Doncic made half of his shots Saturday in Boston, and if not for LeBron James’ groin injury in that game, we might be discussing that fact a bit more.
It was only the second time as a Los Angeles Lakers player that Doncic managed the feat, and he just barely scraped to 50% (11 of 22) with a meaningless layup in the final minute that cut a 12-point Celtics lead to 10.
The Lakers have been winning, but Doncic’s numbers are down. He was shooting 55.5% on 2s and 34.5% on 3s at the time of the trade from the Dallas Mavericks. With the Lakers, he is at 47.5% on 2s and 32.2% on 3s. He has also seen his turnover rate spike despite lower minutes and usage thus far.
As it turns out, we probably should have expected this.
Before we go forward, let’s back up a bit. The Lakers have gone 12-4 since they shockingly pulled off the Doncic deal, including 8-4 in the games Doncic has played. But there has been an odd underlying statistical story to their overall strong play: The defense has been much better than the offense.
That, of course, is the opposite of what you would expect from a team that traded an elite defensive big man (Anthony Davis) and what passed for its best perimeter stopper (Max Christie) to acquire Doncic, a pick-and-roll savant who has not been a factor in the NBA’s All-Defense voting. Yet a Lakers defense that ranked 21st at the time of the trade has been one of the NBA’s top-ranked units since, while the team’s offensive efficiency hardly budged.
Some caveats: Yes, there is some Jedi 3-point defense baked into those defensive numbers, and the opposite might be happening at the offensive end. Also, never forget that the games are played by humans, and things like effort and spirit matter.
Doncic’s “buy in and level of engagement on defense has been awesome for us,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said before the Celtics game, a statement that did not always apply to Doncic’s tenure in Dallas. Similarly, the entire roster seems galvanized by the sudden uptick in its championship equity.
But there is another issue: Chemistry matters. This can be demonstrated with the camera and play-by-play data we now have available.
That takes us to the other reason I was in Boston: the 2025 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference. After almost two decades, it is a very different animal from the one that had me and a few other interested nerds sitting in a classroom. Now it is huge and as much a sports business conference as an analytics nerd fest — perhaps appropriate since analytics has become more impactful in areas like ticket sales and gambling than in the actual playing of the games.
But a good sports analysis can still deliver. In a presentation by Ben Alamar and Dean Oliver, they showed exactly the nature of what we would witness on the court for the Lakers later that night. Using shooting results and tracking data from the NBA, they demonstrated at least one way in which chemistry does matter at the offensive end and the time frame needed to build it.
In particular, Alamar and Oliver studied shooting percentages on passes from teammates and concluded there was a marked decline in shot quality and shooting accuracy from those passes when players were interacting with new teammates. While the study focused solely on catch-and-shoot shots to simplify the analysis, the results were perhaps more staggering than you would expect: Overall expected points from those shots are 5.5% higher by the start of the second season together and 11.7% higher by the end of it.
For high-volume passers like Doncic, the bigger results might not even be in his shooting statistics, but in everyone else’s. The study noted that in Chris Paul’s first season with the Phoenix Suns, his teammates shot an effective field goal percentage of 46.6 in his first two months and 72.3 over the final 20 games. The Suns began the season 8-8 but made the NBA Finals.
In another example that is perhaps more relevant to the current discussion, Alamar and Oliver noted that Kyrie Irving shot far worse on passes from Doncic in his first season with him — one that ended with Dallas in the draft lottery — than in the second one, which ended with the Mavericks as Western Conference champions.
It is not hard to find other shards of evidence for this trend after the trade deadline. De’Aaron Fox, Jimmy Butler, Andrew Wiggins and D’Angelo Russell have all had fairly sharp post-trade declines in their shooting percentages. Going back further, the lack of chemistry in the first season of Damian Lillard and Giannis Antetokounmpo playing together in Milwaukee was palpable, as they hardly even ran the pick-and-roll together; that partnership has become much more potent. Similarly, any semblance of the Doncic-James two-man game has been missing in action since Doncic joined the Lakers.
The good news for Los Angeles is that the worst parts of this effect are on the earliest games together, as you might expect. The presenters’ charts showed a sharp curve over the first several shots that flattened over time but whose slope never quite reached zero. In other words, it is still probably marginally helpful that Jaylen Brown and Jayson Tatum are building even more chemistry in Year 8 together, but vastly greater gains are available for recently thrown-together teammates like Doncic and James.
James’ groin injury will stop the clock on that, but it also makes you wonder if the newly formed “Luk-ers” era was always destined to be more potent in Year 2 than Year 1. An extended absence from James only makes things more challenging for the Lakers, and not just because of its potential impact on playoff seeding.
In a very real, provable way, the Lakers are racing against the clock to wring out the worst impacts of new teammates playing together before the playoffs start. Can they be Phoenix in 2021 and click by the time the games truly matter? Or will the Doncic-James pairing need more time?
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