MAVS 103, NUGGETS 89

[burekemde]

Luka had a brilliant match, and that needs no qualification for being fresh off having COVID. (At this point in time, I’m calling BS on the fat, slow, and lazy narrative.)

Denver was double- and triple-teaming him for much of the night, and he responded with aplomb.  [/font][/color][/size]

Totally agree ML. All this season long, Luka was and still is the most doubled player in the NBA. You certainly do not do that against a fat, lazy, slow unefficient player. It's funny that these terms basically started and/or escalated dramatically only after Luka's injury, and thus after he started limping, and at that time, with no coincidence I would say, the team started losing. The limping was wrongly perceived as a consequence of being fat and moving slow. Instead the real underlying reason was always the ankle injury.

Luka is limping due to his injury. Not because he is "fat". When not limping, as its clearly evident in yesterdays game, he is moving as normally from previous seasons. You don't go from being fit to suddenly being fat over some weeks, and then back again to normal also in terms of some additional weeks. What is a much more likely explanation what is changing is that that many peoples perceptions of Luka are changing so quickly, depending whether he is limping or not, and especially if the team wins or not. Perceptions of people can and do change much faster than a body does - few weeks is nothing uncommon as it is in this case. But when you take those equations out of the way, and look at Lukas play and what he does with the ball and take into account the team and scheming, he is at least as good as in previous seasons. He should have had 14 assists per game this season. I believe he will silence many critics as this season goes along and especially in the playoffs. This is all not to say he didn't gain slightly more weight, yes he is slighly bigger and stronger, but this was completely blown out of scale due to the limping/injury.

I'm really excited about the connection between Luka and JB. In same lineups, they have potential to dominate and this is just the tip of the iceberg we see. The space that Luka creates, JB can exploit with his skills of penetration. Not only can he knocdown an open shot (as THJ, Maxi, DFS etc.), the special thing about Brunson is that if he is provided with little space a Luka pass creates, JB can penetrate and exploit this in multitude of different ways in the paint that our other players cant do. This is why I would really love to see him as a number 3 player to touch the ball after Luka and then Sabonis. But with proper scheming KP could play that second player to touch the ball as well and pass it out to Brunson. Luka and JB fit well together in the same lineups.