Deciding how to defend Luka Dončić is a job for masochists. It’s a sleepless, exhausting endeavor you should never want to have.
“He causes a lot of late-night film sessions and discussions with staff,” Phoenix Suns coach Monty Williams says. Williams speaks for the entire league. “He’s the toughest cover in the league,” Portland Trail Blazers coach Chauncey Billups points out. “You’re just not going to stop a guy like that.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Los Angeles Lakers coach Darvin Ham laments. “We don’t have the answers.”
Nobody does. “You’re not going to take care of everything,” Stan Van Gundy says. Van Gundy, now announcing games for TNT, faced this impossible decision during his most recent head coaching stint with the New Orleans Pelicans during the 2020-21 season. Dončić beat them twice in two games that season and averaged 39.5 points while doing so.
“He destroyed us,” Van Gundy tells The Athletic. “So my choices were not good ones.”
Dončić has become an even more unguardable player than he was when Van Gundy faced him. He’s in the midst of the best season of his five-year career, and he’s scored 50-plus points in three of the past six games. For opponents, it’s no longer about stopping him. It’s about deciding which way he might hurt you the least.
Let’s say you’re the unfortunate soul tasked with making this decision. To save you a sleepless night, we’ll provide you with a guide to stopping Dončić. If you follow these instructions, you’ll at least have a game plan.
Just understand it’s probably not going to work.
Stop letting Luka run his favorite play
You can’t stop Dončić calling for a screen to begin every possession, but you don’t have to guard his pick-and-rolls in a traditional manner. “There’s always people that will trust their defense enough to play him conventionally,” Van Gundy says.
More opponents this season are realizing the conventional approaches meant to keep defenders on their matchups (drop, hedge, up to touch and many others) are Dončić’s favorite targets for a reason.
This season, Dallas scores 1.18 points per possession on Dončić’s pick-and-rolls, per Synergy Sports, a figure that includes pick-and-roll possessions that end with a field goal attempt or turnover from either him or his teammates. It’s the league’s second-most efficient figure (behind only Stephen Curry) among the 25 players who run pick-and-roll most frequently.
You want to stop Dončić from getting into the paint, but you especially want to stop him getting there with a teammate crashing alongside him. Dončić’s incredible ability to delay his decisions until the final moment means he’ll often find his roll man after defenders commit to what they believe is a shot. Dallas has scored 125 points on the 80 times he has passed to a roller this season — an astronomical 1.56 points per possession.
“He does a really good job pausing on one leg and finding people all over the place,” Williams says. “I don’t know if anyone does it like he does, the combination of his skill and size.”
It’s a direct byproduct of Dončić’s uniquely non-American athleticism that lets him slow down and change directions far faster than most. And it’s becoming even more difficult to stop now that Dončić is running the majority of his pick-and-rolls with Christian Wood, a player just as dangerous popping for 3-point shots as he is rolling to the rim.
Dončić is still going to call for screens every possession. Teams just aren’t allowing him to get downhill with the option of his roll man nearly as often this season from that initial screen — even at the cost of leaving other teammates open elsewhere on the floor.
You’d be wise to do the same.
Don’t guard Luka one-on-one
The easiest way to stop Dončić from running pick-and-rolls is to switch them. While that might solve one problem, it creates an entirely new one.
“I can’t emphasize enough that people understand how big he is in stature,” Ham says. “He puts a lot of pressure on a single defender to contain him without fouling.”
That’s especially true when Dončić is choosing which defender to target for a switch. While he has freedom to go at specific players when he sees an advantage, the Dallas coaching staff identifies preferred targets prior to every game. If you let your team switch, he might run the same play targeting the same opponent six or eight times in a row.
“He believes he can score on everyone, which is probably true,” Mavericks coach Jason Kidd says. “But there is a list of players we will have him target.”
Dončić isolates 9.1 times per game, the most in the league, and he’s the fourth-most efficient isolation scorer among players who average at least three such plays per game (1.18 points per possession). He scores on about 57 percent of his post-ups possessions that end with him shooting too. If you play him one-on-one — and especially if you do that while switching everything, allowing him to choose which of your defenders he wants to make his prey — he’ll embarrass you.
If you still choose to switch his pick-and-rolls, you must have your team help the poor, mismatched teammate whom Dončić decided to take on an island vacation.
When you include the isolation possessions in which Dončić passes out to a shot, Dallas’ team scoring efficiency falls to an average of 1.13 points per play. If that was the only way the Mavericks ever scored — if you never once had a defensive breakdown, if you never conceded an offensive rebound or transition opportunity — they’d still have the league’s 15th-best offense.
Of course, it’s much easier to say “send help” than to actually do it. When should you do it? From which area on the court? Dončić can make every pass from anywhere on the floor. He has the intuition to know exactly where you plan to send help.
“Now you’re trying to react to him putting pressure on a single defender,” Ham says. “Now you’re overreacting, now they’ve got kick-out 3s.”
It might take you all night to figure out how, where and when to send help against Dončić in a one-on-one matchup. Then, if your players can just avoid making even one mistake, you maybe can survive with the Dončić-led offense you’re facing just being average.
At least don’t let Luka go right
Let’s say you are fortunate enough to have a roster — or even a lineup — without an obvious defensive weakness. Let’s say you want to trust your lanky, versatile defenders to bother Dončić enough in one-on-one situations to avoid the need to send help as much as possible. You think that’s smarter than gambling on his teammates missing open 3s. Sure, makes sense, if you can do it.
You better tell your defenders to not let Dončić go right, then. He averages 1.12 points when posting up on the right side of the floor, per Synergy, but just 0.91 on the left. He’s more efficient driving right (1.18) than left (1.14) too.
That’s what Van Gundy suggests doing, anyway.
“He’s a better passer going to his right hand, because he can make, you know, that hook pass to the other corner a little easier,” Van Gundy says. “And he’s a better finisher going to his right.”
It’s reasonable advice with one enormous flaw, one that Van Gundy knows.
“Some people force him right,” he says, “because they (want to) take away that stepback 3.”
And when you look at Dončić’s shot map this season, it’s easy to see why.
Then again, you’re probably not going to beat Dončić anyway if he’s hitting his 3s. Dallas is 10-1 when he hits at least four shots from distance.
“That stepback 3 is a weapon,” Van Gundy says. “But if you give me every possibility that Luka’s got in the pick-and-roll, at least early in the game, that’s the one I’m going to live with.”
Would you rather his teammates to beat you?
You need to consider the precise moment to send another defender to Dončić. But when? At half court, he can pass right over the top of your defenders, so that’s too far from the basket for the second defender to recover. If you blitz the pick-and-roll — i.e. have the screener’s man rush Dončić for a double-team — Dallas trusts its big men to receive the ball from him in the middle of the floor and make plays against a defense that’s defending the remaining four offensive players with three men.
The purpose of doubling Dončić must be about delaying him. There’s one specific double-team Van Gundy suggests you use, one he noticed the Suns and Warriors successfully used against Dončić in the postseason.
“I really like the coverage where you switch the initial pick-and-roll and then come back to double him with the nearest guy up top,” he says. “It changes the rhythm of the blitz.”
This strategy causes Dončić to swing the ball sideways rather than advancing it closer to the rim through his crashing big man. And while Dallas has stuffed its roster full of catch-and-shoot 3-point shooters, it doesn’t have many dynamic playmakers off the dribble to turn semi-contested 3s into higher efficiency shots.
You might want to try it, at least for a while.
“The thing is, there’s nothing that is going to work consistently,” Van Gundy says. “(It) never does against great players.”
You can always get weird
Nick Nurse’s Toronto Raptors are known for having some of the league’s most varied defensive schemes. They might change them every possession and use “gimmick” defenses rarely seen at this level. Quirky zone defenses. Box-and-one looks that have just one player playing man defense against one opponent while the other four form a square. Any and every pick-and-roll scheme imaginable.
“What those defenses do is they turn your team more into an equal opportunity team,” Van Gundy says. “I’m surprised we haven’t seen more of that (against Dončić).”
When Toronto deployed these schemes against Dončić in two matchups earlier this season, it succeeded in one way: The Raptors limited him to just 15 field goal attempts both times, the fewest shots he’s taken in any games this season. Toronto won the second matchup on Nov. 26 and held Dončić to 24 points. In the first, though, Dončić still scored 35 on those 15 shots in a one-point win.
But before you start putting on pajamas for a restful evening, there’s a reason NBA teams rarely use these defensive schemes. If you’re a strategic sicko like Nurse, you might want to try them for a few possessions. But if you do, it shouldn’t be because you hope Dončić will be surprised by them. “Luka has seen all these defenses,” Kidd says. It’s that you hope his teammates might not pick up on them as quickly as he does.
The Mavericks’ coaching staff enters each game with an expectation for how opponents are about to play, something that’s based on the opponents’ tendencies and prior matchups. When they relay it to the players, they mostly focus on the base offenses needed to counter the other team’s plans.
“It’s not so much (for) Luka, but for the other four on the floor to recognize what’s happening,” Kidd says.
Even if you don’t get as weird as a box-and-one zone, you have to alter the defensive approaches you use against Dončić throughout the course of a game.
“More than you have to do with other guys,” Billups says.
Remember, you’re hoping for marginal advantages
You can try these strategies. Just remember every team in the league has tried them too. The Mavericks are still scoring 121.6 points per 100 possessions with Dončić on the court, per Cleaning the Glass, about three points better than Boston’s league-leading offense. You’re hoping he hurts you a little bit less than everyone else.
Dončić can’t play the entire game. By making him work harder to succeed, it’s still possible that you can tire him out for the game’s final minutes. “People will say he’s 23,” Kidd told The Athletic’s David Aldridge in November. “But he’s human.” The team has been concerned enough about Dončić’s workload — he has the league’s second-highest usage rate — to voluntarily rest him three times in the season’s opening 38 games.
“All you’re trying to do with the great players is change the percentages a little bit,” Van Gundy says. “You hit the fourth quarter and, you know, a 37 percent 3-point shot turns into a 34 percent shot. Maybe Luka going to the rim for a 70 percent finish turns into a 66 percent finish.”
You should know there’s no shame in failing to stop Dončić. Every coaching staff in the league can relate. Every defender has a humbling experience with him. Dončić, even at 23, is unquestionably one of the greatest offensive players the league has ever seen.
“As an offensive player, if you encompass all of (his strengths),” Van Gundy says, “You put them all together, and I think he’s the best I’ve seen. He’s incredible.”
(Illustration by Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photos of Luka Doncic via Sean Gardner / Getty Images, Glenn James / NBAE via Getty Images, Fernando Medina / NBAE via Getty Images)
More Luka Dončić coverage from Tim Cato
Dec. 28, 2022: Luka Dončić, NBA history and trying to make sense of greatness
Nov. 11, 2022: Luka Dončić can’t do it all, and the Mavericks are in trouble if he keeps having to
Oct. 19, 2022: Luka Dončić the MVP? Here’s how he can do it, and why the Mavericks need him to
May 20, 2022: Luka Dončić’s legend in Slovenia reached new heights in 2022 playoffs
May 16, 2022: Luka Dončić and the Mavericks aren’t just the NBA’s future. They’ve arrived
April 15, 2021: Luka Doncic’s absurd buzzer-beater just confirms he’s the Mavericks’ probability-defying cheat code
March 11, 2020: ‘Luka’s doing magic’: How Dallas discovered its next superstar a world away
Oct. 23, 2019: Slovenia’s enormous passion is willing Luka Doncic to superstardom
Feb. 19, 2019: Luka Doncic’s stepback isn’t just his signature shot, but a glimpse into his unique athleticism
Dec. 24, 2018: ‘These are shots he shoots every day:’ How Luka Doncic learned to make impossible shots
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