Michael Jordan needed seven seasons to win his first title. LeBron James needed nine seasons and two futile trips to the NBA Finals before he became a champion. Shaquille O’Neal got swept in his first finals.
And the newly crowned champion Boston Celtics lost the finals in 2022 and lost in the Eastern Conference finals last year before breaking through now. The lesson, as everyone knows: Winning the biggest prize almost always takes time. Not always.
But usually. Such is the reality for Luka Doncic. At 25, he already is one of the best players in the world, if not the very best of the bunch.
But he’s not a champion. Not yet. The wait for his first championship will extend until at least 2025, which really shouldn’t be all that surprising.
Doncic and the Dallas Mavericks weren’t a logical pick in this series against the Celtics; one was a 50-win team that caught fire at the end of the regular season, the other was a 64-win team that was better than everyone from the very beginning. The smart money said Dallas would fall in these finals, and that’s what happened. It ended Monday night in Boston, the Celtics winning 106-88, an 18-point margin for their record-setting 18th title.
"They’re a great team. They have been together for a long time, and they had to go through everything, so we just got to look at them, see how they play, the maturity, and they have some great players,” Doncic said when it was all over Monday night. "We can learn from that.
We've got to fig.
