Welcome to Layup Lines, For the Win's basketball newsletter. Subscribe here to get it delivered to your inbox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Have feedback for the Layup Lines Crew? Leave your questions, comments and concerns through this brief reader survey. Now, here's Mike Sykes
Happy Friday, folks! Welcome back to Layup Lines. Thanks so much for joining me today. I hope you've had a great week and have a great weekend ahead of you.
Watching LeBron James and Stephen Curry go at it again on Thursday night was an absolute treat. Those dudes are two of the greatest we've ever seen. While we don't know how many more games we'll get like this between the two of them, there's a solid chance we'll see a playoff series between the two this spring. So there's a real chance we might get more of this.
JA MORANT IS SO FUNNY: He's got to be the most hilarious player in the NBA at this point
The show that the two of them put on for us was obviously the main story for Thursday night. But the secondary story that I don't really see as many people talking about is Luka Doncic. Or, at least not in the way I think most people should.
There've been conversations about how poorly Doncic shot. And, yes, he was terrible. He only scored 19 points and shot 6-of-17 from the field. That's a rare poor shooting night from him. He says he'll take accountability for it. But, to me, that wasn't even the biggest problem of the night for Doncic.
Instead, it was this.
By my tracking, Luka Doncic allowed 34 points on defense in direct actions/help scenarios. Handing the Warriors a traffic cone to pick on gives them a major advantage against Los Angeles pic.twitter.com/oI9kYX5MpV
— Charlie Cummings (@klaytheist11) April 4, 2025
The Warriors targeted Doncic throughout the game. The game plan was clearly to attack him offensively and that's precisely what they did. The Warriors attempted 21 of their 82 field goal attempts with Doncic as the primary defender, according to NBA.com's advanced box score. They scored 30 points directly off of those shots. You can see a lot of those points scored in the video above.
This isn't the first time this has happened. The Indiana Pacers attacked Doncic in their nearly completed comeback against LA. Even the lowly
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