![]() The club had already expressed its interest in him, but Dončić and his family still weren’t sure if it was the right move to make so soon. ![]() That summer, months after the tournament, Dončić decided to move to Spain and join Real Madrid’s youth academy. ”In the finals, everyone was rooting for him, the locals were rooting for him. “The anticipation for Luka playing was getting bigger and bigger,” Smolnikar says. Dončić dominated throughout the 16-team tournament, and his 29 points and 15 rebounds in the semifinals set up a championship clash against Italy’s SS Lazio. Even different basketballs - Italian youth leagues featured a smaller ball than the Slovenians used at home - didn’t bother him. The cultural differences made no difference when Dončić was on the court. “I remember the kids, everyone had smartphones except for me. “Italian and Slovenian, these are completely different (languages),” Smolnikar says. Smolnikar recalls how his players would gather around smartphones, which were just becoming ubiquitous, using online translators to work around language barriers they had with their Italian competitors. The tournament, a six-hour drive from Ljubljana, was hosted in the outskirts of Rome, With more family members than fans in the crowd. ![]() “But (Dončić’s) dominance was at a very high level even at that time, so we had high ambitions to win.” “This team (hadn’t) practiced a lot together,” says Jernej Smolnikar, who coached that team. The Torneo Lido di Roma was Smolnikar’s first games with the new generation he had been assigned to, and Dončić joined them. He had just finished his cycle with the generation of boys born in 1996, where the 1999-born Dončić typically played. That’s how Jernej Smolnikar, the newly appointed coach of the under-13 team, had already become familiar with Dončić. It was a 54-point performance he had at age 13, a personal best that lasted almost 11 years. “It’s mostly the same way I play right now,” he says.Īmong all the records Dončić broke that evening, there was still one more: the most he has ever scored in any game of his career. Did he remember it?Īnd with the highlights of a much younger him playing in the background of this room, he makes an observation. It was a game that had happened more than a decade ago, one which old Slovenian coaches and longtime European scouts pointed to when asked to confirm if he had really never scored 60 before. Now, with Dončić standing in this small room typically reserved for pregame chapel, I ask him about his previous personal scoring best. Even though that total set his NBA career high, he had surely done it before, at some point in his career, with everything he had accomplished. That’s why one brief answer Dončić gave in his post-game press conference that evening stood out: his response to being asked the last time he had last scored 60 points at any level. ![]() Let’s look into the numbers and see if there’s much of anything between these two elite-tier operators.His 60 points, 21 rebounds, and 10 assists against the New York Knicks - which included a miraculous game-tying shot, a historic comeback win in overtime, and the first 60-20 triple-double in league history - had become just another record in a career filled with them, as far back as he can remember. They both have gigantic contract extensions kicking in this fall.įolks, it’s time for Steph vs. Unlike so many of the league’s biggest stars, neither wears Nike or Adidas. They’re both coached by former NBA guards with rings on their fingers. They’re incredibly different players - Luka moves like he’s not trying to get anywhere particularly fast, while Steph is basketball’s ultimate quickdraw shooter - but there are more than a few parallels between these two that link their fates in possibly cosmic terms. And that means the legacy of either Luka Dončić or Stephen Curry will take a notable step forward. ![]() Tipping off Wednesday night, the 2022 Western Conference Finals features the Golden State Warriors and the Dallas Mavericks in a compelling affair that will culminate in a punched ticket to the NBA Finals. Well, technically, it didn’t have to be, but the universe willed it into reality. From season stats to head-to-head to contracts and earnings, Boardroom provides the tale of the tape for Luka Dončić and Stephen Curry. ![]()
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