“The Basketball 100” is the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time from The Athletic’s team of award-winning writers and analysts, including veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger. This excerpt is reprinted from the book, which also features a foreword by Hall of Famer Charles Barkley.
“The Basketball 100” is available Nov. 26. Pre-order it here. Read David Aldridge’s introduction and all of the excerpts here.
(Editor’s note: This story was written by Tim Cato)
At 8 years old, Luka Dončić was already transcendent.
His father, Saša, is a local basketball legend, twice winning the Slovenian League championship, once for Ljubljana’s most prestigious club, Olimpija. In 2007, that’s where Saša brought Luka for his first professional practice with the club’s under-9 team.
It didn’t last even a half hour. That under-9 team’s coach was Grega Brezovec, who laughed when he retold the story to The Athletic in 2019. “If I’m honest, I was his coach for only 16 minutes,” he said.
See, Luka was already far too advanced—bigger, stronger, better—than his peers. They moved him to the under-12s practice on the court’s other side.
Since that moment, Dončić has never stopped achieving far beyond what would ever be expected for his age.
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Dončić’s accolades are a repetition nightmare. They started long before he reached the NBA, where he’s made the All-NBA First Team five consecutive seasons after his rookie year, one of only four players to accomplish that since the league’s ABA/NBA merger. They require a constant echo of adjectives like first, youngest, or since, the last typically followed by a long-gone year.
When Dončić was 13, he left Ljubljana, Slovenia, to sign with Spanish powerhouse Real Madrid. He began playing for its under-18 reserves when he was 15. In April 2015, at age 16, he became the club’s youngest-ever debutant in league play. In 2018, he was the first 18-year-old to lead the club to the Final Four of EuroLeague, where he became the event’s youngest MVP. In the Spanish ACB league, he also became the youngest MVP winner and recorded the seventh triple-double in the league’s history. And yes, he was also the youngest of the seven to do that.
That’s a smattering of the awards and records he has already set, ones that are impressive even if they weren’t tied to his age. If this were an almanac, there are dozens more to be listed. But in 2018, Dončić was selected third by the Atlanta Hawks, who had set up a draft night trade with the Dallas Mavericks. And there began his career’s next chapter.
Dončić is far more than his statistics and record-setting achievements, of course. What he has accomplished within this sport might be best quantified that way, but what he has meant to basketball is something more ethereal. It’s his sense of bemusement and childlike joy, his inventive creativity that saturates every moment spent watching Dončić with the possibility of something never seen before on the basketball court might happen.
Before any practice, after any in-game whistle — really, whenever he has a basketball in his hands — Dončić enters his version of a laboratory. The scientific field he studies is trick shots. He’ll create any new shot: full-court flings; seated heaves; bank shots off walls or shot clocks or ceilings; off-handed or one-legged experiments.
Dončić’s fervent zeal bleeds into his on-court play. He teases defenders with every manner of fakes and ploys while inventing new passes even when stuck in impossible positions. His lengthy catalog of clutch shots include some of the wildest makes ever seen: a 3-point floater while he fell over to beat the Memphis Grizzlies; a hook shot from nearly at the scorer’s table to seal a win against the Brooklyn Nets; an intentionally missed free throw that he tossed back through the rim without touching the ground in an overtime win versus the New York Knicks.
Dončić grew up idolizing LeBron James and truly has become the league’s closest thing to him. He’s a 6-foot-7 offense unto himself who consistently leads his various Mavericks teammates into top-10 league-wide finishes. “It’s LeBron James-like,” Dwyane Wade said in 2019, referring specifically to Dončić’s lasered passes to shooters on the opposite wing. There isn’t a pass that he can’t make, that he won’t try.
When Dončić fell to the third pick in 2018, it was a mistake. But the reasons, wrong as they were, had some merit within the league’s old-school beliefs of scouting and player analysis. Dončić’s size and skill were apparent, but the athleticism and mentality needed a shrewder eye.
Marcus Elliott saw it right away. Elliott is a Harvard-trained physician who founded and directs P3 Applied Sports Science, a training institution headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, that has partnered with the NBA. Dončić sought him out, first visiting in the summer of 2015.
“He seemed like he was a Santa Barbara kid who probably played volleyball on the beach, maybe surfed,” Elliott said. “He was so at home here as a 16-year-old, wandering around with all the pro athletes, but acting like a Santa Barbara high school kid. He was adorable.”
What Dončić showed in his workout sessions, though, was a different type of physicality that has made him successful. Dončić stops quicker than most and starts back in another direction before other athletes have fully decelerated. He has better core strength and more flexible joints that can handle more physical torque. Elliott’s P3 testing, which focuses on measuring functional athleticism rather than one-off maximums, saw right away that he was special.
“Luka’s one of these guys that his most glaring performance advantages, his superpowers, are not the things that have traditionally defined athleticism in a basketball player,” Elliott said. “[That fact] makes him the perfect athlete for teams to get confused with [and] make bad decisions about his athleticism.”
Dončić’s last superpower, the one that might be his greatest strength, is the manner in which his brain processes the basketball court. It’s in his spatial awareness to see part of the court and re-create the rest of it based on his opponent’s positioning. It’s in his decision making, which he can delay several fractional seconds longer than expected and still react accordingly.
That’s why Dončić made this list even though he has so many more years of his career ahead of him. It’s these abilities — his shooting touch, his skill, his improvisation, his basketball-specific athleticism, his mind — that already make him one of the NBA’s 100 greatest players.
We don’t yet know what Dončić will represent to basketball when his career’s complete. That will be determined by the heights he has not yet reached and the failures still to come.
We already know what he means to his country. In a word: everything.
Dončić has changed Slovenia, a country whose pride comes from its diminutive size — some refer to their country as “small New Zealand” — and whose self-identity is intrinsically tied to its smaller impact on the global stage. The athletes who carry Slovenia’s name into the world are ambassadors, and currently Dončić has become their greatest pride.
How Dončić played the previous night is discussed over morning espresso. When Dallas plays afternoon games, a preferred time slot for a country seven hours ahead, they are events. Luka Štucin, a Slovenian broadcaster, knew how far Dončić mania had spread because of the emails he received during Dončić’s 2022 run to the Western Conference finals.
“It was all Hotmail,” Štucin said then. “It was old people writing to me.”
Dončić became known to Slovenia during the 2017 EuroBasket tournament, which Dončić and longtime NBA point guard Goran Dragić helped win for the first time in the country’s history. It was the moment that a young kid who a few knew had great potential became a true Slovenian success story.
But some of those select few who knew of Dončić prior to the tournament worried he wouldn’t feel Slovenian, not after he had moved to Spain at the formative age of 13. That’s as important to the country as athletic success. When 2,000 Slovenians attended Dončić and Dragic’s first meeting in the NBA, a March 2019 Mavericks-Heat game in Miami, their scarves said exactly that — I FEEL SLOVENIA — as they bounced and chanted for an hour after the game.
Dončić has proven that and more: He’s a Balkan lad, Saša’s son, proud of his country even when he’s away. He has joined every possible national team competition and supported other Slovenian athletes on social media, even within sports that have smaller global presences, like volleyball. He’s proven his unofficial ambassadorship of his homeland is one he takes seriously.
Štucin believes Dončić already is Slovenia’s greatest athlete. “I think it’s not even close, man,” he said in 2022. Slovenia has been a successful sporting nation for its size, especially within team sports. To have an individual athlete succeeding in North America, though, is something else. To realize that Dončić, an NBA finalist for the first time in 2024, might be a future MVP, someone who has started his career on the same trajectory as LeBron James, is almost unbelievable to him and many others.
And by being that, Dončić has forever changed Slovenians. They’re not more proud of their country because of him. He’s just allowed them to show it on an even greater stage.
To say that Dončić has begun his career on the same trajectory as James, whom some consider the game’s GOAT, isn’t a comparison that can be handed over lightly. Nor is it an assumption that it will continue in the same manner.
But so far, it’s true. Only James and Oscar Robertson had recorded 9,000 points, 2,500 rebounds, and 2,500 assists within their first five seasons before Dončić joined them. And not even James finished with four All-NBA first-team appearances before turning 25, something only three other players have accomplished in the league’s history. What made James his generation’s greatest, though, is everything else that came after that. It would be no failure if Dončić does fall behind James’s curving path toward the sport’s ascendancy.
And Dončić, by his own admission, doesn’t want to be James. Before facing James’s Lakers in a 2022 matchup, Dončić half-seriously said, “I have no goals.” When asked if he could replicate James’s longevity, he said, “There’s no way, because I’m not playing that much.” Where Dončić sees himself at age 38 is a retired life on a Slovenian farm that produces milk, vegetables, and cheese — not one playing basketball.
There will be time, years from now, to anoint Dončić’s final place in basketball history. Despite all he has accomplished as a young man, far more than almost any other player, he has begun to reach the years that will ultimately define him.
But where he falls within this sport’s history doesn’t matter right now, because we know he’ll be in it — and we still get to watch just how high he ascends.
Career NBA stats (through 2023-24): G: 400, Pts.: 28.7, Reb.: 8.7, Ast.: 8.3, Win Shares: 51.2, PER: 25.7
Achievements: Five-time All-NBA, Five-time All-Star, Rookie of the Year (’19)
Excerpted from “The Basketball 100” published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)
