There is no good time to lose a player like Luka Dončić, and no good way to lose him. But the way the Los Angeles Lakers lost him Thursday night — in the midst of getting absolutely poleaxed by the defending NBA champion and Western Conference-leading Oklahoma City Thunder, to a non-contact soft tissue injury, just over two weeks before the start of the 2026 NBA playoffs — is about as brutal as it gets.
The Lakers’ lifespan this season likely rests on the severity of the left hamstring strain that Dončić suffered, and whether his stretch on the shelf will be closer to two weeks or two months. “There’s a lot on the line,” is how injury expert Jeff Stotts of In Street Clothes put it, and that’s true in multiple directions: for the fate of Dončić’s late-season surge toward the top of the Most Valuable Player race, yes — seriously, it’s like someone wished on a cursed monkey’s paw that voters could see what the Lakers looked like without Luka — but also for L.A.’s chances of winning a playoff series for the first time in three years.
“At this point, at this juncture of the season, it’s the last thing you want to see,” LeBron James told reporters.
Hindsight is 20/20, and also unhelpful, but watching how Thursday’s game unfolded after the fact, you start to wince in anticipation of what’s coming. Late in the first quarter of what was already a blowout against Oklahoma City, you could see Dončić grimacing as he ran back on defense after a jump stop and layup and after hitting the deck on a drive. Soon after, you could see him reaching for his left hamstring — which he’d strained back in February, costing him four games heading into the All-Star break — after missing a free throw, and again while James shot one.
After a brief rest at the start of the second quarter, he appeared to be moving gingerly, but remained in the game, delivering a pair of assists and drilling a 3 over great defense by Luguentz Dort. Late in the second, though, Dončić drove on Thunder guard Cason Wallace, leaped to throw a cross-court pass to Luke Kennard in the corner, and then once again came down grimacing and reaching for the back of his left leg. He labored on his way back down the floor, grabbing for it again after a Shai Gilgeous-Alexander dunk, before staying in for the final minute of the first half.
Dončić received treatment on his left hamstring at halftime, but Lakers coach JJ Redick said that he’d been cleared to return to the contest.
“We’re not going to put a player at risk,” Redick told reporters. “Those things happen.”
And when they do, all you can do is deal with the fallout as best you can … and brace for impact.
The Lakers now find themselves facing the prospect of a stretch without one of the NBA’s most overwhelming forces — a near-peerless offensive engine whose ability to consistently create and cash good looks for himself and his teammates at Herculean volume has been the driving force behind their second straight 50-win campaign.
Dončić is headed for his second scoring title, pouring in a league-best 33.5 points per game; his 8.3 assists per game are good for third in the NBA, behind only Nikola Jokić and Cade Cunningham. Between his own scoring and the points he generates via assist, Dončić accounts for 71.2 of the Lakers’ 116.5 points per game, according to Databallr; only Jokic (72.2) creates more.
The advanced metrics, as you might expect, largely paint Dončić in a beatific light. Among players who’ve played at least 60 games, Luka ranks third in value over replacement player, fourth in estimated plus-minus, box plus-minus and Jeremias Engelmann’s xRAPM, fifth in player efficiency rating, win shares and Neil Paine’s wins above replacement, and sixth in The BBall Index’s LEBRON and DARKO daily plus-minus.
Reasonable people can disagree over whether Dončić’s brilliant play and towering production merits placement ahead of the likes of Gilgeous-Alexander, Jokić and Victor Wembanyama in this year’s Most Valuable Player race. It’s pretty close to inarguable, though, that he’s in their company, ticketed for a fourth top-five finish on the MVP ballot and a sixth selection to the All-NBA First Team.
Or, at least, he was.
Thursday’s game was Dončić’s 64th of the season; as you’ve no doubt heard, players must appear in 65 games to be eligible for year-end awards under the player participation guidelines the NBA instituted before the 2023-24 season. The Lakers have five games left on their regular-season schedule; he’d need to not only suit up for, but play at least 20 minutes in, one of them to hit the 65-game mark.
He’d need to suit up because, while the policy does include a “season-ending injury” exception, that clause only applies to players who’ve appeared in at least 85% of their team’s games prior to suffering the injury; Dončić has played 64 of the Lakers’ 77 games, which is just over 83%. And he’d need to play 20 minutes because he’s already had the two “near-miss” games — outings in which he played fewer than 20, but more than 15 — that the policy allows. (The one-game suspension that Dončić served this week for racking up too many technical fouls now looms awfully large.) There is also perhaps one more avenue for Dončić to gain awards eligibility, but it certainly seems like a long shot:
If Dončić is unable to qualify, then he’ll join Cunningham, Anthony Edwards and a litany of high-profile players who find themselves ineligible for consideration by the media members who comprise the awards electorate — an exceedingly rare case of a player being able to lead the league in scoring, but unable to be recognized as one of its 15 best players.
Beyond individual accolades, though, the uncertainty surrounding Dončić’s wheels obviously places a massive hurdle in front of the Lakers with just 10 days left in the regular season — one that threatens to derail the momentum they’ve built up during a sensational stint that had seen them win 16 of 18 games entering Thursday.
Entering Friday’s action, the Lakers sit at 50-27, one game ahead of the 49-28 Denver Nuggets, who’ve won seven straight. L.A. stands a decent chance of holding onto the No. 3 spot in the Western standings, by virtue of both holding the head-to-head tiebreaker over Denver and facing a season-ending slate that includes matchups against the tanktastic Mavericks and Jazz, which, according to Tankathon’s remaining schedule strength rankings, looks significantly friendlier than the Nuggets’ closing kick, which features two more meetings with Wembanyama’s Spurs.
Whether the Lakers hold onto third place or drop down to fourth, though, they desperately need Dončić back in the fold to have any shot of making a deep playoff run — and maybe even just to make it out of a first-round matchup against either the Houston Rockets or a Minnesota Timberwolves team that drummed L.A. out of the 2025 postseason.
The Lakers are 43-21 (.672 winning percentage) with Dončić in the lineup and just 7-6 (.538) without him, with four of those seven wins coming against the woebegone Kings, Mavericks, Wizards and injury-ravaged Warriors. They’ve been outscored by 2 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with Dončić off the floor, according to Cleaning the Glass, scoring like a bottom-10 offense in those minutes — even when both James and Austin Reaves have been available to carry the offensive load.
That relative punchlessness likely informs the dire outlook that multiple public-facing projection systems offered Friday morning. Dunks and Threes and ESPN’s Basketball Power Index both give the Lakers less than a 50% chance of making it out of Round 1, while Basketball-Reference.com has dropped their odds of hoisting the Larry O’Brien Championship Trophy all the way down to 0.2%.
Projection isn’t prophecy, of course. With time to gameplan, to shuffle the deck and find a new angle of attack — possibly slotting Rui Hachimura or Jake LaRavia in the starting five, alongside a returned-from-ankle-injury Marus Smart — maybe James, Reaves, Redick and Co. will have enough in reserve to be able to stay the course for however long Dončić’s absence might last. What those odds underscore, though, is a fundamental truth of life on the eve of the playoffs for teams vying for the crown: The margins are vanishingly thin at this time of year, and sometimes, all it takes to swing them is one false decel step.
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