Luka Doncic has had a championship slip away from him before. He led Dallas to the NBA Finals only to lose in five games to Boston, a result that left him publicly vowing to come back better.
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That loss was about being outplayed. This one, in a new Sports Illustrated feature with Chris Mannix, is about a mistake Doncic says he made to himself.
On April 2, roughly two weeks before the playoffs, Doncic tweaked his left hamstring late in the first half against Oklahoma City, with the Lakers already trailing by 31 points. He could have sat the rest of the night. He didn’t. Five minutes into the third quarter, he pulled up again, this time with what was later diagnosed as a Grade 2 strain that ended his season before the postseason even started.
“I should have,” Doncic said, asked whether he should have come out at halftime. “When it comes to my spirit of trying to win, I am just stubborn. I felt a little bit in the first half that I should have just stopped. I should have come out. I think we had a team that could compete for the championship. I definitely regret it.”
The injury turned out to be worse than first understood. An MRI in Dallas initially showed a standard Grade 2 strain, but a follow-up evaluation in Spain revealed deeper damage, according to The Athletic.
Luka Doncic missed the Lakers’ entire playoff run, which ended in the second round against Oklahoma City, the same team he’d been hurt against weeks earlier.
Doncic’s regret wasn’t only about basketball. In the same interview, he opened up about a personal situation that made the season especially difficult. Last December, he flew to Slovenia for the birth of his second child and asked his fiancée, Anamaria Goltes, if he could bring their older daughter back to the United States with him.
A dispute followed. Police were called to the hospital in Kranj after Doncic had already left. He returned to the U.S. without seeing his daughters again until April.
“It made everything about last season so hard,” Doncic said. “You want to be around your kids every day. I saw mine, what, four or five days? It’s impossible to do.” Doncic and Goltes have since separated, and he’s said plainly he doesn’t intend to go through another season carrying that kind of weight.
Taken together, the two confessions reveal what looked at the time like simply a tough, injury-riddled year. Doncic was playing through physical pain on a team he believed could win a title, while also managing a strained personal life that kept him away from his children for months at a time.
He’s entering this season with LeBron James gone to Philadelphia and the Lakers built more around him than ever. Carrying both the basketball lesson and the personal one into a fresh chapter he’s hoping looks nothing like the last.