Doncic falls in love at the home of the Nets

Excellent performance by Luka Doncic in this season’s visit to the Nets camp in New York on Thursday evening. Second victory for them after the Slovenian star gave a real recital at the Barclays Center. Triple double of the bombastic ones, of those who are pronounced with some difficulty, of the good ones: 41 points, 11 rebounds and 14 assists. And by no means sterile, it was the force that forced the rival to have to focus on something else because no one could handle it. To praise those numbers a little more, a few more considerations: he is the first player who, adding the 3 recoveries also obtained, reaches those figures in a single NBA game; he is only the 10th player to have three or more 40-point triple-doubles; he is already the top scorer of the average championship, 36’3, and is close to ten between rebounds and assists. For giving shape to what has been achieved, being the numbers and everything that involves a mere accompaniment to what was experienced in Brooklyn.

It took an extension, however, to break the locals. The tie was reached at 112 in regulation time and only the control of Doncic in extra time which, moreover, was extended more than necessary so that the final score was 125-129. It would have been difficult, however, to get candy from a team that was over 50% in shots two and three.

Cross comes out again for the Nets, who have only won one game of the five played and see the other teams from the back of the Eastern Conference. Excessive punishment this time for Kyrie Irving, who scored 39, and Kevin Durant, who scored 37. Without wanting to fill this chronicle with much more data, another goes to explain where these two are: he is the second pair of teammates , the other was formed by Kiki Vandeweghe and Alex English in the 1983 Nuggets, in which each exceeded 100 points for three consecutive games and all were defeated. They’ve been accused of something in other games, not the Mavericks. They were nine and Doncic ten, maybe that was the only difference. The odd man for Nash, Simmons, left another critical night for social media to gloat and an alarming lack of contact facing the edge that at some point or another will mean a response from the Nets.

Simmons didn’t have a bad start. A hook with the right to open the appointment and two plays on the run by choosing the best option. He stood up in the stands. His joy of him did not last long because in the final part of the fourth he threw a layup that did not even touch the circle, which is complicated, and from that he lowered his level of courage. In the early stages Doncic tried to sink his defenders, Irving or Mills, into the two poles to dominate from there, even if the first set was closed with a triple on a Yuta Watanabe mark that gave +7 to his team. With the arrival of the second, overturned: two long shots from the Japanese, one from Irving and a basket from Durant, fill the gap for the Nets.

In that first long break for Doncic, the locals hit +8 and with the audience wanting more. The return of the Slovenian has put things in their place. It was a play in which Doncic passed it to Bullock so that he could throw three that gave them the advantage in the interval, action that would be repeated in another more important phase of the game with less luck.

The second half started well for Brooklyn, with Irving dancing with opponents and a dynamic play that allowed for quality attacks in seconds. Doncic, on the other hand, had his rhythm. Playing with contact and being defended by Simmons, without any effect. Yes, in the eighty draw there was a turning point: an assist with both hands behind the head that Kleber did not miss. We hit a normal Dallas run with such brilliance. Nine of advantage came to have those of Kidd, the one that the Nets loaded in a few minutes. The game went haywire in the last few minutes. Luka’s only blatant mistake came in the penultimate play of regulation time, when he fumbled under pressure from Irving and Simmons and let Durant’s next dunk equalize the score. In the last comes Doncic’s side pass for Bullock’s triple, which this time he can’t get through.

In extra time he played as a maestro. Doncic hit the first, a mid-range shot, and made Brooklyn look only to him. The next three were the triples of his teammates, which he released: by order, Hardaway, Kleber and Bullock. Despite Kevin Durant’s attempts to curtail, which had no effect, the evening ended at Barclays with a rather ugly photo, that of a bottle full of water that falls a few centimeters from Doncic and extends it to dry the field with the game already decided, in addition to the fact that none of the players was hit by the object on their body. An ending that takes away, the game was very good.