PHOENIX — This is, unquestionably, what an MVP looks like.
On Christmas, Luka Dončić was unrivaled amid the day’s marquee performances specifically scheduled by the league to feature its best.
The Dallas Mavericks star finished with 50 points, the fourth 50-point Christmas Day game in league history, joining Bernard King, Wilt Chamberlain and Rick Barry. He made eight 3-pointers while shooting 15 of 25 overall, adding six rebounds, four steals and three blocks to 15 brilliant assists. He served as the 6-foot-8 battering ram against an opposing defense that tried drowning him with double teams and extra attention.
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It was all hopeless.
“He’s one of the best in the world,” Mavericks coach Jason Kidd said afterward. “Don’t take it for granted.”
No, Dončić’s performance in the Dallas Mavericks’ 128-114 win over the rival Phoenix Suns doesn’t make him the 2023-24 MVP favorite. But that discussion — Should Dončić win it this season — is a misdirect at this point of the year. We evoke it because there’s drama and intrigue in discussing who belongs in the conversation, spilling virtual ink to converse about players who may or may not deserve a conversation about whether they should join a conversation. It’s too soon to discuss the MVP race anyway, we say, right before listing our leading candidates.
Sometimes, we discuss whether it’s a weak or strong awards race this season, tacitly implying that some who fall short could have been winners in the past, while other award holders are less deserving. We have meta debates about how the narrative affects this, those very conversations proceeding to affect that narrative.
But the MVP discussion gets at something more visceral and deep-rooted within our enjoyment of this sport. It represents transcendence, something easier to discuss through proxy debates like awards for players whose careers haven’t yet merited an association with the sport’s established greats.
And what Dončić did on Christmas was transcendence.
To that point, the 24-year-old’s evening began with another superlative. With 4 minutes, 52 seconds remaining in the first quarter, Dončić pulled up from 34 feet to knock down a deep 3 to reach 10,000 career points, the youngest player to reach that mark since Michael Jordan. As Phoenix called a timeout, Dončić pranced down to the other end of the court where the Suns players retreated to their bench, talking smack at anyone who would listen.
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At one point, Dončić was talking to two Suns assistant coaches, Greg St. Jean and Quinton Crawford, who were both on the Mavericks’ staff last season. “I was telling them I’m a catch-and-shoot (guy) this year,” Dončić explained. “They got to step up on those.”
At another point, it was a fan who told Dončić that “he sucked,” the representation of the arena-wide boos Dončić received before and early in the game.
“Somebody was yelling, ‘You suck,’ so I said, ‘Who sucks?’ ” Dončić said during his postgame interview on the court.
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Dončić has been the league’s most double-teamed player this season, a fact amplified of late with running mate Kyrie Irving missing the team’s last nine games with a foot injury.
On Monday, Dončić dealt with another relentless barrage of second opponents sent his way from the Suns, whose fans know incredibly well what Dončić can do against them in their building even if both rosters have changed over. But Dončić, who, in addition to his 15 assists, had another 10 passes not logged as such because his teammates missed shots, overcame that attention while tallying up his career’s sixth 50-point performance.
“When you’ve been doubled your whole career, you have a feel,” Kidd said. “You know where the space is.”
What defines MVP-level transcendence is an on-court ubiquity that can be seen and felt even more than it can be measured. Dončić played 44 minutes and has averaged 40 over the past 11 games because he is the Mavericks’ ever-running engine that promotes and causes all of this team’s advantages. It often feels impossible to take him off the floor. Dallas is fifth in the Western Conference, perhaps surprising given last season’s bottom-five finish that had them missing the playoffs.
But that catastrophe provided the worst feelings of Dončić’s career, ones which fueled him into a dedicated summer where he took his conditioning more seriously than ever before and made him capable of what he’s doing now. Not just to carry his offensive burden, but to do it without the defensive shortcomings that have plagued him before.
“You didn’t ask about my defense,” Dončić complained as he walked away from the dais where he conducted his postgame interview. With a serious expression, already in the hallway heading back to the team’s locker room, he said: “I gotta at least be second-team All-Defense.”
Dončić cannot do this alone, and it was the roster’s shortcomings around him that led to last season’s failure. This season, minimum signings like Dante Exum and Derrick Jones Jr. have offered needed athleticism that Dončić amplifies as well as anyone. Rookie center Dereck Lively II, who returned from a four-game absence on Monday, has started every game since the season opener and is far ahead of his expected development schedule. While Dončić isn’t a candidate for an NBA All-Defense team, Lively said Dončić made sure to let his defensive contributions known in the locker room after the game. If Dončić had known he had a team-high-tying six shot contests, he probably would have mentioned that, too.
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The MVP conversations we have can get bogged down by the meaning of what a “two-way player” is, and it’s unquestionably valuable when players provide elite contributions on the other end. But in a league where offenses only continue to soar, Dončić has provided passable — and sometimes positive — defensive performances while making his argument to be a top-two offensive creator in the NBA. His candidacy, his transcendency, looks far more like Nikola Jokić’s than Joel Embiid’s. But both have resulted in MVPs.
But that’s the thing: MVP discussions have shortcomings. They pit players against each other. The criteria seems to be ever-changing. But it’s about transcendency, providing us a more comfortable framework to discuss whether we’re watching one of this sport’s greatest players before he has earned such nomenclature.
Whether Dončić keeps doing that, game after game, may result in whether he’s seriously discussed, whether he’s in the MVP conversation, whether he’s victim to a strong award race, whether it matters or doesn’t that he is or isn’t considered.
What we watched on Christmas, though, was that transcendency we crave. For now, it doesn’t need to be any more than that.
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(Top photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)
