Luka Dončić is one of the most mercurial talents that the NBA has ever seen. In the 2010s, he was the Lamine Yamal of world basketball. Leaving his home country of Serbia to join Real Madrid’s vaunted basketball team at 13 in 2012, he made his senior team debut at 15, earned his first appearance for the Serbian national team at 17, led them to a EuroBasket title at 18, and finally, his crowning teenage achievement, a EuroLeague MVP and championship for Real Madrid at 19. He was winning international tournaments while his US peers were taking the SAT, and winning world club championships while they were playing college basketball. People couldn’t wait to see what this guy could do in “The League,” and he sure as hell did not disappoint, as he has consistently finished in the top 5 of MVP voting perenially, and averaging a cool 28 points, 8 rebounds, and 8 assists to this point. Most strikingly, however, is his penchant for seizing the moment and creating insaner moments by piecing together trick shot filled scoring runs that change the course of games. He creates more “how the hell” moments than anybody in present-day basketball. So it made sense that he would become part of the shoddily-written-athlete-biography-industrial-complex.
Glancing at the bibliography for Tim MacMahon’s The Wonder Boy: Luka Dončić and the Curse of Greatness, I was surprised to see that almost every single source was from an ESPN article written by MacMahon himself. In a sense, this tells the whole story: Of the book itself and of what the book was attempting to be. While it is an error of judgment to expect a book to be something that it’s not, I was very disappointed to find that the book read as if the contents of MacMahon’s collected ESPN articles were dumped into a large language model, and directed to write a 300-plus page book about Luka Dončić’s basketball career from childhood to the present. While MacMahon does execute this basic premise to a T, the book, while devourable like candy to the casual NBA fan, does not contain any thread compelling enough to either rope in a non-basketball fan or a basketball “head” looking for unique insight, something like a hypothesis or theory that’s tested out, or, simply, something we don’t know, dude.
We want to know where someone came from and how they got to where they are now, to read the story of someone’s career. Call it a thirst for the hero’s journey. Call it the human impulse to narrativize one’s own and others’ lives. A kind of completionism. So much so that we jump the gun and want to tell a story-that’s-only-just-gotten-started’s ending. This is precisely what MacMahon tries to do in The Wonder Boy, and as such the story he tells, in exchange for a sense of finality and authority, is someone, or something, else’s story. In fact, Luka Dončić fails to become the book’s protagonist, or rather, MacMahon doesn’t make a compelling enough case that Dončić is the book’s protagonist.
The real protagonist of the book is the abstract NBA organization, and Luka tends to fit into the narrative as an institutional asset (and risk) rather than a fallible human being. Luka’s “human, all too human” quality par excellence is objectively calculable and noticeable: his perceived lack of conditioning and problems with weight. But because that fact is so apparent, it becomes incredibly easy to accept the fact that he’s human without digging in any deeper, whereas other sports’ biographies or documentaries focus on a seemingly perfect figure and generate interest through excavating the humanness, digging into specific events and periods of the subject’s life to reveal something universal. Wonder Boy expects something interesting to arise in due course through its breadth and chronological exhaustion, but fails to strike the kind of gold that comes only from a specific kind of digging at a specific site.
If we forced ourselves to accept that Luka Dončić is, indeed, the book’s protagonist, then the primary thesis would be: What a remarkable career Luka has had so far. If, instead, we come to the conclusion after having read the book that the abstract NBA organization is the protagonist, within which players are primarily viewed as assets to be managed, the main thesis is much more compelling, as MacMahon makes clear himself:
“There’s no greater gift in the game than getting one of the precious few players great enough to be the centerpiece of a championship team. However, the work is only beginning for those fortunate franchises. The hard part is keeping those superstars happy. The cure that comes with the gift is the fallout if it fails.”
MacMahon historicizes this phenomenon well. A fantastic beat reporter and astute ball-knower, he correctly notes that the majority of championship teams satisfy one major requirement: having one of the top 5 to 7 best players on the planet on your team. While having one of these guys on your team doesn’t guarantee the highest level of success (LeBron on the Cavs in the 2000s, the Steve Nash era Suns, Joel Embiid’s Sixers, Chris Paul, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden’s entire careers), it is almost a necessary condition. Luka Dončić is unquestionably one of these players. As an organization, your number one priority becomes keeping that star happy and doing everything you can to make sure he remains a part of that elite class without alienating him.1
This philosophy became extremely clear after LeBron James left the Cleveland Cavaliers in 2010 to “take his talents to South Beach,” which MacMahon correctly historicizes. James and Toronto’s star big man Chris Bosh “conspired” with the Miami Heat’s mercurial shooting guard Dwayne Wade to create both a super-team and cement the arrival of the super-team era in the NBA (from approximately 2008-2024), an era defined by players’ wresting control of their careers (and destinies) from the teams that drafted them with ever-dwindling levels of success as time went on. The era defined by years’ long team building through the draft, as exemplified by dynasty-worthy organizations like the San Antonio Spurs, gave way to super-teams like the Miami Heat, the Cleveland Cavaliers when they re-signed James to play with Kyrie Irving and Kevin Love, and the Golden State Warriors when they signed Kevin Durant in 2016 (later iterations haven’t quite been as successful, such as the LA Clippers when they traded for Paul George and signed Kawhi Leonard in 2019, and the present iteration of the Phoenix Suns starring Durant, Devin Booker, and Bradley Beal, which has led, in tandem with new parity-striving salary cap rules, to a resurgence of the home-grown team as exemplified by the Oklahoma City Thunder). In this landscape, particularly from 2018 (when Dončić was drafted) to the present day where building a superteam is a strategy amongst many rather than an overpowered meta, it is incumbent on the organization to maximize the team’s championship window while a star player is under the team’s control without destroying their future prospects by forfeiting too many assets (in the form of players and draft picks), to balance allowing time to build a team organically over time with the need to bring in high level talent at a premium. But the fundamental variable in all of this calculus, which the organization desperately wants to be a control variable, is the viability of their superstar player, in this case Dončić.
MacMahon explores this viability in the background of a yawn-inducing narrative of every single micro-period of the Dallas Mavericks from Dončić’s draft day to the day MacMahon finished his final draft. Particularly memorable are MacMahon’s accounts of Luka’s individual creativity’s clash with his first NBA coach Rick Carlisle’s dogmatic system, the Mavericks attempt to pair Dončić with the Lithuanian 7-foot tall sharp-shooter Kristaps Porzingis, and the total organizational failure to resign the eventual New York Knicks’ star Jalen Brunson in 2022, and the various pitfalls of having an outspoken owner in Mark Cuban, who kind of re-defined how an NBA owner behaved, and what one looked like, less “rich old white man” who stays out of sight by design, more outspoken middle-aged rich white man, a proto-Elon Musk. In each instance, we look at the defining moment or dynamic, such as those above of a one to two month period (the length of time each chapter covers, more or less), and ask ourselves how the Mavericks and Luka each respectively reacted and contributed to the situation. The answer from the Mavericks end is usually interesting, with MacMahon, in the Brunson case, highlighting the hubris of Mark Cuban and the challenges posed by the New York Knicks having Brunson’s dad on the their coaching staff, as well as his godfather, Leon Rose, as team president. From Luka, we rarely get anything other than quotes he gave to reporters. Luka said “I’m tired as hell,” which MacMahon reads as a critique of the Mavs front office for letting Brunson go. When Dončić starts playing games with Kyrie Irving, who the team traded for to fill in the Brunson void in the 22-23 season, Dončić says things like “I never played with a guy like Kyrie, so it’s obviously going to be a work in progress. But I think it’s going to be fine. We both can play on the ball.” He thinks that providing isolated Dončić quotes will somehow add up to a compelling point, while he saves his interpretive capacities for organizational risk analysis that explains Dončić’s career in the abstract.
While MacMahon, at least ostensibly, takes us through an almost endless amount of individual games and performances, he fails to connect the accretion of events with a larger narrative. He is unable to see the forest for the trees. Like a McMansion, whose components gesture toward what a house should be and is without actually being one, the book’s narrative is comprised of facts that should, theoretically, add up to a book (which it has), but what we’re left with is a massive house with no sense of it being a narrative home.
Fortunately for MacMahon, an ending can retrospectively turn the miscellany of the past into an understandable shape. The ending in this case is that the book is already, in a sense, outdated: just weeks before the book’s publication, the Mavericks gave up on Luka Dončić and traded him to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis, Max Christie, and draft picks, in a deal that was widely criticized for how little value the Mavericks got in return. The book becomes, despite its strivings, a fun romp through the Mavericks’ Luka Dončić era. MacMahon’s focus on the NBA organization as an abstract entity operating entirely on cost/benefit analysis becomes much more interesting given recent news. The trade for Dončić sets the stage for a shorter, more interesting book, about the trade itself. I would venture to say that there are very few people out there who understand the internal decision-making processes of an NBA organization like Tim MacMahon, not just because he is a beat reporter but because of his real skills as a journalist. I just have a problem with the book’s focus: with some editing, it could’ve been focused more on the NBA organization and feel less obligated to simultaneously mask itself as a biography of Dončić. If it wanted to focus on Dončić, MacMahon could’ve relied less on cherry-picked quotes and convoluted interpretations, and more on Dončić’s personal moments. There is a Youtube video of gamers playing Overwatch and chatting with one of their teammates on a stream, gradually they learn that they were playing with Luka in disbelief. The video shows something that is impossible to glean from MacMahon’s narrative: that Dončić is a weird guy, and I feel like mining and highlighting moments like this would’ve done more of the biographical legwork than reading the tea leaves of Luka’s postgame interview responses.
In any case, the book does not know what it wants to be, and whether that’s MacMahon’s fault or the fault of a niche in the publishing industry that demands the constant publication of athlete biographies, it’s left me disappointed, which pains me even more so since I like the podcast he does with Brian Windhorst and Tim Bontemps, the Hoop Collective. Perhaps he should stick to podcasting for the time being, until he has a book he needs to write, rather than volunteering to write a book that, for the publisher’s sake, needs to be written. Write the Luka trade book, MacMahon. That’ll be something worth the amount of time I spent writing and thinking about The Wonder Boy.
- See: LeBron James leaving Cleveland in 2010 for Miami due to the Cavs’ poor roster construction around him; The Brooklyn Nets’ firing Kenny Atkinson in the pre-covid KD era because he continued to start Jarrett Allen over KD’s friend DeAndre Jordan; Giannis Antetokounmpo flirting with leaving Milwaukee until they traded Jrue Holiday for Damian Lillard; and perhaps most notably, The Los Angeles Clippers securing the signing of Kawhi Leonard in 2019 by acceding to his demand to trade their best assets, including a young Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, who went on to become MVP in the year of our lord 2025, for Paul George. ↩︎
Billy Lennon
Billy Lennon is the founder and publisher of the journal you are currently reading.