Doncic becomes more formidable: There’s less of him

NEW YORK: The recent pictures of Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers make his offseason dedication look plainly obvious.

For 16 hours a day, six days a week, he did not eat, saving all his meals for an eight-hour window. He put the basketball away after the worst season of his NBA career and gave himself completely over to his strength and conditioning team. He was intentional with the meals he consumed and his movements on the court and in the weight room.

The initial results are visible in an incredibly public way.

Doncic — once a punchline for fat jokes, the guy who cracked beers and broke opponents’ ankles, the player whom the Dallas Mavericks publicly bet against and privately disparaged — is on the cover of Men’s Health. The lines separating the muscles on his tanned arms are sharp. The cushion around his bearded jaw line has evaporated. His physique has been completely redone with the help of Anze Macek and Javier Barrio from his physical wellness team.

But if you just see a shrinking Doncic, you are missing the bigger picture. The body, the publicity, the determined look in his eyes, the sweat reflecting the spotlights, they are all part of a bigger plan. That plan, according to some around Doncic, was going to be fulfilled no matter what happened in his pro career. To everyone else, it is so clearly a response to the humiliation and pain caused by the Mavericks’ decision to cast him away from the city where he had planned to spend his entire NBA career.

Maybe, when you see the magazine pictures, you see skinny Doncic. Maybe you see one of the NBA’s most noticeable revenge bodies. But maybe you should step back and see how everything that has happened over the past few years has led Doncic to this place. It was a perfect storm that allowed the Lakers to acquire him at a time when he has never been more committed.

The timing of all this, though, is a signal to the NBA that this version of Doncic is ready to reclaim his spot as one of the best in the world.

The magazine spread (and three accompanying articles) dropped this week as Doncic began a bit of a summer tour of the United States, beginning with multiple appearances in New York City before a one-day stop in Chicago and ending in Los Angeles. Not coincidentally, the stop in Los Angeles on Saturday coincides with the date Doncic can sign a contract extension with the Lakers to formalize a partnership that the organization has eagerly been planning for since it acquired him for Anthony Davis, Max Christie and a first-round pick on Feb. 1.

When Doncic was traded to the Lakers, he had not played in more than a month. He was out of shape, carrying a combination of extra weight and extra stress from a midseason trade that uprooted him and his young family from the one American city they had ever lived.

Some sources in Doncic’s inner circle believed he was on a path toward this kind of physical transformation whether or not Dallas general manager Nico Harrison had bet against him. Doncic and his management team began working with Macek and Barrio in 2023. A year later, he helped carry the Mavericks to the NBA Finals and followed that by playing for his national team in Slovenia’s failed bid to make the Paris Olympics.

The belief on Doncic’s team was, to some degree, that as he matured as an NBA professional, he would adopt better habits and a stricter strength-and-conditioning program instead of the competition-driven approach he had been comfortable with. But improvement is not always linear, and Doncic suffered a number of physical setbacks in 2024 that certainly made it easier for the Mavericks to explore options other than handing him a colossal contract extension.

Whether Doncic would have been the same quality of fitness model had he not been traded is sort of irrelevant. Same if you think the driving reason for this change is to stick it to the Mavericks for trading him (and justifying it by highlighting his weaknesses). It came at a moment when he had the most financial motivation. Depending on how he structures this extension, it could be the precursor to the richest deal in NBA history in 2028 (when he could hit free agency after 10 years of league service).

All that matters is that this is the version Doncic is now. The Lakers are getting a player at a time when he has the most reasons to commit himself to his craft, to his new team and to the promise that he is the league’s most talented player.

His approach this summer, from shedding weight to adding strength to recruiting new teammates, shows who Doncic is as a player and as a pillar of the Lakers now as much as any cover shoot could.

But the pictures that dropped this week were not subtle. Whether it is revenge, maturity or timing, it’s not difficult to see that the Lakers are about to get the best version of Doncic.

And that, they think, will be worth every penny.