- 1 day ago
Luka Doncic is one of the most decorated, NBA-ready teenagers to ever enter the NBA Draft, and yet multiple teams convinced themselves he wasn't worth a top pick. To understand why (and why the Dallas Mavericks DID pick him), you need to trace the prior history of foreign prospects in the NBA Draft. It got a little weird for a bit.
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00:072018 NBA Draft. Two picks on the board, Atlanta Hawks on the clock with the third overall pick.
00:14Over on ESPN2, Brian Windhorst is cooking.
00:18Windy knows this Hawks pick is a big moment, and he's really juicing it for television.
00:23In the Atlanta draft room is what's going to be the most important thing that happens in this draft.
00:27Whether they make a trade in the next five minutes, all the offers are coming in.
00:31Luka Donich is available right now. Is there a team out there that wants Luka Donich?
00:35We're either going to have it now or we're not.
00:37Travis Schlenk is going to establish the early part of his general managing tenure on what he does in the
00:42next five minutes.
00:43Of course, if you care about this stuff, you're also checking Twitter.
00:46So you've just seen the Woj tweet that Windy will now read live on the air.
00:52Adrian Wojnarowski is reporting Atlanta and Dallas have swapped.
00:54It's going to be the Dallas Mavericks.
00:57Dallas Mavericks are going to take Luka Donich.
00:57No players involved in the deal.
00:59And now you're just shaking your head.
01:02Somehow, despite holding the fifth pick in the draft, the Dallas Mavericks will get Luka Donich.
01:08Of course, Donnie Nelson did it again.
01:22Welcome back to the Draft Cavern.
01:24This is every single pick in the history of the NBA draft.
01:29Sign the waiver and pause if you want to read it.
01:32Nerd.
01:33Okay, let's start with a 2018 opinion.
01:37Luka Donchic not being the first pick in this draft was ridiculous.
01:42I'm not saying that going third overall is some great insult.
01:46And I'm not saying Donchic will one day go down as the best player from this draft class.
01:50All I mean to say is that in 2018, Luka Donchic was one of the most obvious future superstars in
01:58the history of the NBA draft.
02:00He was the safest bet, the most promising prospect in that class by far, at the time.
02:06And yet, multiple teams passed on Donchic while another one scrambled to get him.
02:13To understand that contrast, we must follow two intertwined stories.
02:18The career of Donnie Nelson and the whole history of foreign players in the NBA draft.
02:251970 was the first time an NBA team drafted foreign players directly from abroad.
02:31These guys hadn't gone to college in the U.S.
02:34Here is the first such player to actually play for an NBA team.
02:39And right around here is when Donnie Nelson got involved.
02:43Donnie is the son of NBA legend Don Nelson.
02:47After Donnie's own basketball career hit a dead end, he devoted himself to coaching and scouting.
02:52In the late 80s, the younger Nelson made his own name by bringing Sarunas Martialonis straight from the Soviet Union
02:59to his father Don's Golden State Warriors.
03:02Scouting international talent became Donnie's thing.
03:06In 1997, Don Nelson, the father, became Dallas Mavericks general manager.
03:12Months later, he appointed himself head coach too.
03:15And then, Nelly hired his 35-year-old son mid-season, announcing right away that Donnie would skip the line
03:23and succeed him as head coach in two years.
03:26That is an extremely unusual way for an assistant coach to come aboard.
03:31Then, that new assistant convinced his dad to use a precious 1998 lottery pick on a gangly German jumpshooter.
03:40Big balls, Donnie.
03:42But it worked out.
03:44Dirk Nowitzki's stardom proved one of Donnie Nelson's guiding principles.
03:49That excellent NBA prospects could flow to the league through any number of pipelines, not just American schools.
03:56And soon thereafter, Pau Gasol and Yao Ming also became NBA superstars.
04:01Totally justifying the novelty and the perceived risk of picking non-college foreigners near the top of the draft.
04:09Of course, foreigner is way too vast a category.
04:14Dirk, Pau, Yao, Pedro Stojakovic.
04:19These are varied players with varied backgrounds who get grouped together only because they weren't born in the U.S.
04:26and didn't play college ball.
04:28That describes most people in human history.
04:32And yet, it seems like those guys getting picked early in their drafts and then becoming stars maybe sort of
04:40like bewitched some NBA GMs.
04:43Because here we enter the upside-down era of international drafting.
04:48NBA teams in the 2000s and the early 2010s found some great players overseas late in the draft.
04:54Several of these guys became legit NBA stars and should have been tippy-top picks.
05:00But then if you look at the guys from overseas who were tippy-top picks...
05:05Ugh.
05:06Now, high draft picks bust all the time for a million different reasons, college players included.
05:13But to an American audience, the college guys were familiar, orthodox picks.
05:19Andrea Bargnani was a gaunt, mysterious white guy with gelled hair and a girl's name.
05:25When Bargnani arrived, he got lumped in with different guys from different countries that had nothing to do with him.
05:31They were just foreign.
05:32And when he struggled, somehow, entire continents' worth of basketball players became even more suspect.
05:39That is absurd.
05:41And it's xenophobic.
05:42And it betrays the kind of race essentialism Americans have about basketball.
05:46The international players didn't prove anything about each other or about, like, the world.
05:52But perhaps their draft order demonstrated that the NBA's international scouting apparatus was out of calibration.
06:00For over a decade, while plenty of excellent foreign players entered the league through the draft, teams picking up in
06:07the lottery failed to select a single international non-college player who went on to become an all-star.
06:15Most of them didn't even come close.
06:17So if Donnie Nelson started a trend by using a primo draft pick on Dirk Nowitzki, the trend was souring.
06:24It was warping, oversaturating.
06:27So what about Donnie himself?
06:30Well, despite being hired as his dad's eventual successor, Donnie did not become Mav's head coach.
06:38In 2000, ostensibly the year Don Nelson would pass the reins to his son, the whole Dallas franchise changed hands.
06:46Dot-com bubble beneficiary Mark Cuban bought majority ownership of the team.
06:51Upon meeting Cuban, Don Nelson said,
06:53Eh, forget it.
06:55My son should not succeed me as coach.
06:58I don't know what changed his mind, but Don remained GM and coach, which brought Donnie to a fork in
07:05the road.
07:06In 2002, the Denver Nuggets offered Donnie Nelson their head coaching job.
07:11Dad immediately offered to step down as Mav's coach, but Mark Cuban hatched a different plan to keep both Nelsons
07:17in place.
07:18Cuban promoted Donnie Nelson to Mavericks president of basketball operations.
07:24This is a funky setup.
07:26On the sideline, dad was head coach and son remained his assistant.
07:31In the front office, dad was GM and son was president.
07:36Exactly who was whose boss was sort of a gray area, which would become important later.
07:41In the meantime, the Nelsons' zany scouting adventures continued.
07:45Mark Cuban proved willing to foot the bill, even when the bill got kind of crazy.
07:51In 2002, the Nelsons visited a gym in Belgrade to watch an undrafted Serbian forward named Ogunjan Askravic.
07:59Askravic didn't show up, but hey, how about that?
08:03Darko Milicic did.
08:04The 17-year-old Serbian big man Donnie had called the LeBron James of Europe.
08:09Whether or not the Nelsons intended to watch Milicic play, they were breaking a rule by doing so.
08:16Fines and suspensions came down.
08:18I am so thankful that the Fort Worth Star-Telegram sent a photographer to document that suspension,
08:25or else I would not have believed that the Nelsons watched their own home opener at a Dave & Buster's
08:31while wearing custom prisoner outfits.
08:33The irony here is that, guilty or not, the Mavericks were a perennial playoff team.
08:38We will never know if Donnie would have burned a lottery pick on the likes of Darko,
08:42because the Mavs of this era never drafted that high, with one exception.
08:47After a disappointing 2004 season, Dallas traded for the fifth pick in that summer's draft.
08:54True to form, Donnie gazed abroad.
08:57On draft day, Don Nelson heard Donnie talking about drafting the Big Russian at five.
09:04That would be Pavel Podkolzin.
09:06This came as a surprise to the elder Nelson, who, I will remind you, was the team's general manager.
09:13Donnie and Don met privately in the bathroom, where son informed father that he, President Donnie,
09:20had been authorized by Mark Cuban to run draft night.
09:24Dismayed, Don pleaded with Donnie, if not as a GM, then as his dad.
09:29Do not use the fifth pick on Pavel Podkolzin.
09:33And he didn't.
09:34Dallas drafted Devin Harris, a college kid, fifth overall.
09:38And then they were able to get the Big Russian 16 picks later.
09:43Now, the only reason we know about any of this is Don Nelson's falling out with Mark Cuban,
09:49his resignation in 2005, and transcripts from the subsequent lawsuit.
09:54Donnie took over his dad's vacated GM title, which is sort of bitterly poetic,
09:59because Don may have saved Donnie's job that day in the men's room.
10:04Picking Pavel Podkolzin fifth overall instead of 21st would have been a disaster on par
10:10with the most notorious international busts of the era.
10:14The Big Russian was just not fit for the NBA.
10:17Devin Harris, meanwhile, was very important to the Mavs after Steve Nash's shocking departure,
10:24then became a key element in their trade for Jason Kidd,
10:27who was in turn a key element in Dallas' run to the title.
10:31Oh, yeah.
10:32With Dirk leading the way,
10:34Donnie Nelson's Dallas Mavericks won the franchise's first ever championship in 2011.
10:39And, you know, that's the point.
10:42Duh, I know, but Donnie Nelson felt compelled to say that out loud sometimes.
10:48Even while reiterating that winning was always Dallas' goal,
10:53Nelson spoke of international basketball like that was his true purpose.
10:58Here, I will remind you that Donnie got into scouting through his stint in a traveling Christian sports ministry.
11:06That relentless international fixation raised eyebrows, especially before Dallas won it all.
11:14Nelson spent part of every year zipping around, eyeing obscure prospects from far-flung nations.
11:21None of these guys were the next Dirk, and most of them didn't even come close.
11:26And Nelson got some flack for it.
11:29That 2011 title shut some critics up, but it didn't quench Donnie.
11:34In 2013, the Mavericks finally fell out of postseason contention.
11:38Donnie held his first lottery pick in years and grew enamored with a relative nobody,
11:44a gawky Nigerian-Greek teenager playing for a second-tier club in Athens.
11:50Most mock drafts had him much lower than the Mavericks' 13th overall pick.
11:55Still, Donnie told Mark Cuban he would risk everything to get his guy.
12:00Cuban said no.
12:02The Mavs owner preferred cap space anyway.
12:05Dallas traded their pick, and Donnie's beloved Greek kid went 15th overall to Milwaukee.
12:11Yet another future international superstar picked outside the lottery.
12:16All I can conclude is that executives got overexcited by Dirk and Yao and company,
12:23and then got spooked by the results of their own overexcitement, that upside-down era.
12:27Decision-makers holding lottery picks grew needlessly wary of prospects in overseas leagues.
12:34They couldn't believe their eyes even when the truth was obvious.
12:37I'm not saying Giannis himself was obvious, but in this case, the truth was always obvious.
12:44This photo is from a Slovenian news website.
12:48I tracked it down because of something Goran Dragic once said.
12:52Here is Dragic with the basketball club Union Olympia on the day they won the 2008 Slovenian League championship.
13:00That summer, by the way, Dragic would become yet another foreign player picked late in the draft,
13:05who then blossomed into an NBA star.
13:07Here, Dragic is 21, but he looks like a baby, especially compared to this teammate,
13:13who is a full 12 years older than Dragic, and at this point already had a 9-year-old son.
13:18The son is right here.
13:21He wasn't on the team, obviously, but the adults in this photo had already noticed
13:26that something was special about Luka Doncic.
13:30Luka grew up around Slovenian pro basketball teams because of his father, Sasha Doncic's career.
13:37Olympia coaches set Luka up with the other 8-year-olds in their training program
13:41and then realized after literally 16 minutes that he was much too good for his own age group.
13:47This continued.
13:48At every level, Luka was bigger, better, and smarter on the court than all of his peers
13:55and basically all the older kids, too.
13:56A huge child with sparkling touch and the brain of a seasoned point guard.
14:03Real Madrid signed Doncic away from Slovenia before he was even done with puberty.
14:08Madrid trained him beside their stable of excellent veteran guards
14:12until the first possible moment Luka himself was able to join the senior team.
14:17That was 2015, when he was just 16 years old,
14:21the youngest player ever rostered by the Spanish powerhouse.
14:25Luka grew to 6'8 with long arms, and he never lost that innate court vision.
14:31Plus, he could shoot that thing from anywhere.
14:34Entering adulthood, Doncic became a role player and then a real contributor for Madrid.
14:40And then, in the 2018 season, the year he turned 19 years old,
14:46Luka went nuclear.
14:47Youngest Spanish league MVP ever.
14:51And a title.
14:52Youngest Euro league MVP ever.
14:55And finals MVP.
14:57And a title.
14:58Doncic voluntarily declared for the 2018 NBA draft
15:02and arrived in the United States wielding that resume.
15:06Luka had been a known, pedigreed prodigy since yay high.
15:11Now, he was a 6'8", 19-year-old with a playstyle ideal for the NBA,
15:17holding basically every accolade from perhaps the, I don't know,
15:21second-best basketball competition on earth.
15:24This was one of the most qualified players ever to enter the NBA draft.
15:29And yes, he was born, raised, and employed overseas.
15:32He had that one thing in common with, I don't know, Mario Hazonia.
15:39Doncic had competed against American players, NBA players, many times,
15:43but he did not play college basketball.
15:46Coaches, players, scouts, journalists, everyone who had studied Luka said,
15:52do not fall into that comparison trap.
15:55This kid is special.
15:57When the Phoenix Suns won the draft lottery,
16:00then immediately hired Luka's Team Slovenia coach,
16:03it seemed obvious where they were headed with the first pick.
16:06Nope.
16:08Then surely Sacramento Kings GM Vlade Divac,
16:11himself a former EuroLeague standout turned NBA star,
16:15would know to ignore a relevant precedent and just take the kid at two.
16:20Nope.
16:22Nothing against DeAndre Ayton or Marvin Bagley,
16:25but I truly believe that teams preferred the college guys to Luka
16:29not because of size or fit or whatever,
16:32but because so many of these totally unrelated foreign names
16:36had proven to be the wrong picks.
16:39Executives talked themselves out of a special player, a sure star.
16:43Donnie Nelson did not.
16:46When Luka slipped to three,
16:48his long simmering conversation with the Hawks turned to full boil.
16:52Donnie and the Mavs scouts had been clamoring to trade for Atlanta's third pick
16:57and grab Luka,
16:58and this time they weren't alone.
17:00The Dallas analytics department loved Donchich,
17:04and that's what really won Mark Cuban over.
17:06Cuban finished the deal by going over Donnie's head
17:09and just contacting the Hawks owner directly.
17:11So Atlanta was the third team to pass on Luka.
17:15They too preferred a college player,
17:17wearing shorts.
17:18The Hawks and Mavs did their deal.
17:21This was another pretty nice draft night for Donnie Nelson's Mavericks.
17:26None of these people lasted in Dallas,
17:28but it was cool for a moment, at least on the court.
17:31Luka arrived just in time to learn from Dirk,
17:35and he proved his NBA excellence much faster than his mentor once did.
17:39Rookie of the year,
17:40All-Star by year two,
17:43NBA leading scorer,
17:44and Western Conference champion by year six.
17:47For the Mavericks,
17:49Luka magic stopped right there,
17:51but not because of anything Donchich did.
17:53Simultaneous with Luka's rise,
17:56Sports Illustrated and an independent investigator
17:58uncovered a cesspool of grim behavior in Dallas's front office.
18:03Then came even more allegations.
18:06Donnie Nelson left the Mavericks in 2021.
18:08Then he sued Mark Cuban,
18:11alleging that Cuban had fired him
18:13as retaliation for Nelson reporting an instance of sexual misconduct.
18:17The suit was later settled,
18:19but Donnie's time with the Mavericks was done.
18:22Then Cuban sold majority ownership of his team to Ghouls,
18:26and then the Ghouls traded away Luka Doncic.
18:31Nasty stuff, top to bottom.
18:33Fuck the Mavs.
18:34But this isn't about the Mavs.
18:36This is about basketball talent.
18:39There is basketball talent everywhere on Earth.
18:43Donnie Nelson carried the torch
18:45for a long line of NBA scouts
18:47who believed in that talent and reached for it.
18:50If the pipelines Donnie and company helped lay ran dry
18:55or twisted around themselves in the late 2000s,
18:58then maybe this generation of stars
19:01helped straighten them back out.
19:02Still, teams will scout poorly at the top of the draft.
19:06Still, they will find gems late in the draft.
19:09And still, NCAA programs will sometimes spot these guys first.
19:14Of course.
19:15But these pipelines will not stop flowing.
19:17And what keeps someone like Donnie Nelson involved
19:20is the opportunity to strengthen them and to build more.
19:24So many vast swaths of our planet,
19:28huge countries and basketball-loving countries among them,
19:31remain relatively unexplored by NBA scouts.
19:35These places do not lack talent.
19:37Some lack funds or infrastructure, leagues.
19:41Some just need time and attention.
19:43All that is building as we speak.
19:45New opportunities, new pipelines.
19:49New flags adorn the walls of our draft cavern each passing year.
19:53Everywhere on Earth, people are hooping.
19:57Everywhere on Earth, a few of those people
19:59have what it takes to join us here.
20:02We'll check back someday.
20:04Until then, happy scouting.
20:34We'll see you next time.
20:36We'll see you next time.
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