Luka Doncic scored 40 points for the third straight game on Wednesday, and the box score still isn’t the best thing he did in Sacramento.
In the third quarter of the Lakers’ 116-103 win over a Kings team already trying to blow itself up, a fan sitting courtside grabbed a loose ball and fired it as hard as he could at referee Chelisa Painter while she wasn’t looking. Doncic saw it happen, stopped play on his own, and waved over security until the guy was ejected. He didn’t wait for anyone else to notice.
Doncic walked straight up to the fan and asked him, on camera, what the hell he was doing. After the game, he shrugged it off like it was obvious: “He just tossed it really strong, the ball, toward the ref. I just asked him what the hell he’s doing.”
No press training, no spin, just a guy annoyed that a referee got hit with a basketball in the middle of his own game.
https://x.com/HaterReport/status/2118212860388200706
That clip is going to get more engagement than the box score, and it should. It still isn’t the real story.
This didn’t happen on some random Wednesday, either. Doncic walked into Golden 1 Center in the middle of the best eight-game start by any player since Michael Jordan was doing this in a different decade.
Through eight games, Doncic has 308 points at 38.5 a night, shooting 52 percent from the floor and 45 percent from three. The last time anyone scored that much that early in a season was Jordan, who had 303 points through his first eight games of 1988-89. Jordan is also the mark Doncic just passed to get there, since his 307-point start from 1986-87 had stood as the next-best total for almost four decades. Only Wilt Chamberlain, who scored 418 points in that same stretch back in 1962-63, has ever done it better.
Six straight games of 35 points, five rebounds, five assists and five made threes, something no one in NBA history had ever done.
He’s doing it without much help, too. The Lakers still haven’t solved Doncic’s bench depth problem, and he’s been covering for it by himself.
JJ Redick, who watches him more closely than anyone, called this the best basketball he’s seen from Doncic.
None of this is a clean story, though. A referee got hit with a basketball in a sold-out arena, and the first person to do anything about it was a visiting player in a road jersey, not whoever on that building’s security staff gets paid to watch for exactly that. Doncic looking out for Chelisa Painter says plenty about him. It says more about how little protection referees get until a star decides to make it his problem.
There’s no stat category for noticing a referee take a basketball to the side of the head from forty feet away. If there were, Doncic would be leading the league in that too.
