Luka Dončić put up his third straight 40-point game Wednesday in a 116-103 win in Sacramento. Shooting under 50 percent from the field makes it look like he had to grind for those points. The full box score says he didn’t.
The Scoring Was On Par With His Season
Dončić shot 11 of 23 from the field and 6 of 13 on 3-pointers (12 of 13 on free throws). That is a true shooting percentage of about 69.6 percent and an effective field-goal percentage near 61 percent. He scored 40 points on 23 shots.
Compare that with what he had done before the game. Coming into Sacramento, his line read 38.3 PPG, 68.3% TS. His season true shooting percentage now sits at 68.5 percent — it went up after this game, which only happens when a night beats the average.
The three-point shooting held up too. He went 46 percent from deep, better than the 42.7% from 3-point range he had shot to open the season, on about the same volume.
The Doubts Come From the Field-Goal Line and the Turnovers
The case against starts inside the arc. Take out the threes and Dončić made 5 of 10 two-pointers. Before this game he had been making just over 59 percent of them, so that 47.8 percent overall mark is the sloppiest part of his shooting line.
Then there are the six turnovers, and the opponent. The Kings came in 1-6 and allowing 124.3 points per game, so a 47.8 percent night against them doesn’t scream dominance. The game also had a lot of whistles: the Lakers made 15 of 17 free throws in the fourth quarter and finished 34 of 38 for the game.
The free-throw explanation doesn’t hold up, though. His 13 attempts were only a few above his season average of about 10 per game, so this wasn’t an outlier. Drawing fouls has always been part of how he scores.
Count the Turnovers and It Still Matches His Season
The real test is to count everything his possessions cost the Lakers: shots, trips to the line and turnovers. By that measure he scored roughly 1.15 points per possession he used in Sacramento. Over his first seven games, with about five turnovers a night, the same math comes out to roughly 1.16.
That gap is too small to mean anything. On a night that looked messy, he scored as efficiently as he has all season, and the six turnovers only pulled it back to his normal level. The weak two-point shooting was offset by better shooting from three and at the line.
The sample is eight games. He has played in eight of Los Angeles’ nine games and has scored 308 points, the first player to top 300 in his first eight games of a season since Michael Jordan scored 303 in 1988-89.
Nobody should expect a 68 percent true shooting mark on this many shots to last all season. But the Kings game doesn’t show it slipping.
If his efficiency does slip, the turnovers are the number to watch. He averaged five a game before Wednesday and had six against one of the league’s worst defenses. Field-goal percentage will make the headlines, but the turnovers decide whether this pace holds up.
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