The Dallas Mavericks are two wins away from the Western Conference Finals, but they are navigating these playoffs with significant health concerns regarding their star player.
“All series long, we have seen what appears to be Luka Dončić laboring up and down the court,” Jared Greenberg of TNT reported ahead of Wednesday’s Game 5 against the Oklahoma City Thunder.
“Today, I was told if this were the regular season, he would have been shut down for a minimum of at least two weeks. Luka has been getting two-to-three hours of daily intense physical therapy to treat a litany of ailments, including a sore knee, an ankle sprain, a back injury and a sore achilles that I learned has been bothering him for approximately the last four months.”
Dončić has clearly been dealing with pain as the Mavericks battle the Thunder, and his numbers have suffered accordingly.
He averaged 22 points on 39 percent shooting from the field and 31 percent shooting from three-point range through the first four contests. While many players around the league would be happy with those totals, it is a far cry from his regular-season scoring totals of 33.9 points a night on 48.7 percent shooting from the field and 38.2 percent shooting from deep.
To Dončić’s credit, he is finding other ways to impact the game.
The five-time All-Star averaged 10.8 rebounds, 7.8 assists and 2.3 steals per game in the first four contests against the Thunder, which the two teams split.
Still, it is difficult to envision the Mavericks defeating the West’s top seed and advancing to the conference finals without the league’s top scorer finding his touch again on the offensive side. It also hasn’t helped that Kyrie Irving has been so inconsistent as a scorer in this series.
He scored 20 points in Game 1 and 22 points in Game 3 but had just nine points in each of Games 2 and 4. Like Dončić, he impacted those contests in other ways with 20 combined assists, but Dallas is going to need more from its other guard with the primary option laboring so much.
For now, Dončić will continue to play through it as he looks to guide the Mavericks into the Western Conference Finals. But his performances should at least be graded on a curve given his physical ailments.
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