Luka Doncic has been one of the best basketball players in the world for the last several years. He just completed a fantastic regular season in which he led the NBA in scoring average and registered 33.5 points, 7.7 rebounds, 8.3 assists and 1.6 steals a game.
However, he has received plenty of criticism, especially over the last year or two, for his alleged shortcomings. A fair number of people have accused him of being a weak defender, and some even feel that his numbers are, to an extent, empty calories and that he doesn’t make the type of impact a true franchise player should.
The Athletic polled 161 players and asked them to name the most overrated players. Houston Rockets center Alperen Sengun got the most votes, but Doncic was also on the list, as he received 3.7% of the votes and came in tied for fifth-most votes.
At this point in his career, since he hasn’t won a championship yet and has gotten to the NBA Finals just once in seven previous seasons, one cannot definitively say that Doncic cannot lead a team to the promised land. In his six and a half seasons with the Dallas Mavericks, he never had a supporting cast that was truly strong enough to win it all. With the Los Angeles Lakers, he has had more help around him, but the consensus is that the Lakers’ supporting cast is still a bit short of being a championship-level one.
Yet before Doncic suffered the hamstring strain on April 2 that has kept him out since, the team was starting to truly come together. It won 16 of its 18 previous games coming into that April 2 blowout loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder, and it beat numerous very good teams, including the New York Knicks, Minnesota Timberwolves, Denver Nuggets and Houston Rockets.
One only has to look at how much L.A. has struggled offensively in the playoffs to see how much of an impact the Slovenian has had. During the regular season, the team averaged 116.3 points a game and shot a league-high 50.2% from the field. But in seven playoff games, it is at 99.6 points a game, which is 14th among the 16 teams that made the playoffs, and it is shooting 46.4% overall, which is seventh.
In the regular season, the Lakers were 10th in offensive rating. So far in the playoffs, they rank 12th among 16 teams in that category. They still haven’t reached the 110-point mark in regulation in any postseason games this year.
This article originally appeared on LeBron Wire: Luka Doncic got votes in balloting for most overrated NBA player
