Luka Doncic will not play against the Clippers on Wednesday night at Intuit Dome. The Lakers listed him out with back tightness on the second night of their first back-to-back, and Ziaire Williams is out too with left foot soreness, as Jovan Buha and Dave McMenamin both posted Wednesday afternoon. Doncic scored 41 in Tuesday’s 136-129 loss to Portland and leads the league at 36.0 points per game, per ESPN.
Sitting him is the right call. My take is about what comes next. Tonight can’t become the plan for every back-to-back, because the schedule and the 65-game rule don’t leave room for it. The rest the Lakers need has to come out of his minutes on the nights he plays, and so far those nights have run long.
The Minutes Already Ran Hot
Here is Doncic through four games, per ESPN’s box scores:
| Game | Minutes | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Warriors, Oct. 21 | 30 | 28 |
| Clippers, Oct. 23 | 37 | 23 |
| at Jazz, Oct. 25 | 38 | 52 |
| Blazers, Oct. 27 | 37 | 41 |
The opener was a 22-point blowout, so he sat early. The three games since were 37, 38 and 37. Before the season I argued that the Lakers should cap Doncic around 34 minutes, with no 38-minute nights unless a game demanded one. One week in, he has already had one, and the other two came within a minute of it.
I’m not saying those minutes caused the tightness. Nobody outside the building knows that. But a team that wanted to keep him near 34 would not have let him average 37.3 over three games in five nights.
Why Back-to-Backs Can’t Be the Release Valve
The easy answer is to sit him on the second night of every back-to-back and play him freely otherwise. Count them first. ESPN’s schedule has 80 of the Lakers’ 82 games dated so far, and by my count from it, tonight is the first of 15 back-to-backs. The next one is close: Toronto on Sunday, Nov. 1 and Miami on Monday, Nov. 2, both at home. Then the Lakers play at Detroit and at Atlanta on Nov. 8 and 9.
Now the awards math. To be eligible for MVP and All-NBA, a player needs 65 games, and a game only counts if he plays at least 20 minutes, with up to two more allowed in the 15-to-20 range, as James Herbert of CBS Sports laid out in April. Adam Silver said in June that “the rule is working” and that he’s “not ready to support a change yet,” per Ryan Young of Yahoo Sports.
Sit Doncic on all 15 second nights and he can play 67 games at most. That leaves two games for everything else: a sprained ankle, a sore hamstring, a family matter. He played 64 games last season and needed the league to rule him eligible anyway. In the case I made about his MVP chances, games played was the first item on the checklist. A blanket rest rule makes that item harder, and it doesn’t touch the 37- and 38-minute nights at all.
Some back-to-backs will deserve a night off. Tonight, with a sore back and a Clippers team missing Bradley Beal, Brandon Ingram and Rui Hachimura, qualifies. As a standing rule, it costs too much.
What Last Season Shows
Doncic doesn’t usually skip the second night. The Lakers had 14 back-to-backs last season, per Basketball Reference. He played the second night of nine of them and played both nights seven times.
Three of those seven were long on both ends. He went 40 and 38 minutes against New Orleans and Milwaukee in November, 37 and 38 against New Orleans and San Antonio in January, and 38 and 38 against Houston and Miami in March, rounded from the Basketball Reference game log. The Miami game was the 60-point night.
I loved that night. But it’s the profile of a player who will always want to play, and two weeks after it he strained his left hamstring in Oklahoma City, per the Associated Press, and missed the playoffs. A star like that needs the limit set before tip-off. He isn’t going to ask out of the second night of a back-to-back, and he isn’t going to ask out of the fourth quarter either.
Three Minutes a Night Is the Better Trade
Here’s the version I’d sign up for. Take Doncic from 37 to 34 in a normal game. Over 65 games that is about 195 minutes, or five and a half of his games at his current 35.5-minute average, without missing a single one. Every one of those nights still counts toward the 65.
The Lakers have to win those extra minutes, and that is where Tuesday hurt. Portland beat them by 14 in the 11 minutes Doncic sat, which we broke down in the piece on the Lakers’ bench minutes. Tonight the bench gets a bigger share of the game, and it plays without Williams, a starter who has played between 24 and 31 minutes in every game, per ESPN.
Austin Reaves played 39 minutes on Tuesday and is about to carry the offense on the second night. The Clippers are short-handed too, and they turned it over 26 times against the Lakers last Friday, per ESPN, which is why I warned earlier today that Clippers turnovers can hide the Lakers’ defensive problems. More useful than a win tonight would be Sandro Mamukelashvili, Collin Sexton and the rest of the bench showing JJ Redick that he can trust them with three more minutes a night once Doncic is back.
The Lakers’ next game is Friday at Golden State. If Doncic plays, the number I’ll check first isn’t his points. It’s his minutes. Thirty-four with a win means the Lakers learned something from a sore back in October. Thirty-eight means they’re still hoping April takes care of itself.