The Olympic dream of Luka Doncic: To take Slovenia to their first Olympic Games

In games at Olimpija Ljubljana, a powerhouse in Slovenian basketball, there was a boy of no more than eight years old who used to mop the floor and even shoot baskets with his friends during timeouts. That boy was the son of the teams’ captain, who played in the club’s youth academy system where, 15 minutes into his first practice, the game was halted so he could train with boys three years older. He was that good.

That scenario has been a constant in Luka Doncic’s career: a precocity that has challenged the natural evolution of the basketball player every step of the way.

From his debut at 16 with Real Madrid in the Spanish league, the hardest national competition in Europe, to his debut in the NBA at 19 joining the Dallas Mavericks, where he broke a barrier every other European player before him had taken time to break down: from day one, he was the star and the franchise player of the team.

At Olimpija Ljubljana, along with his father, Sasa Doncic, he also played his early idol, Marko Milic, and a young prospect with whom he would conquer Europe a decade later, Goran Dragic. With both Dragic and Doncic at the helm, Slovenia, which had never won a medal in its young independence, won the 2017 EuroBasket.

Four years later, Doncic is playing again with his national team with another ‘first’ in mind: qualifying for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, taking place in 2021.

In his debut with Real Madrid’s first team as a teenager, Doncic caught the first ball that arrived in his hands and, without even dribbling, made a three from the corner. That sort of play could just be a lucky one-off, but it’s been a trend, which has helped forge a sense of belonging with which he has climbed every new step in his career.

Doncic, who was born in Ljubljana in 1999, arrived one the scene in 2012 after shocking everyone as a guest player in the Minicup, a tournament that hosts the best U13 players in Spain. Only two and a half years later, he was making his debut with the first team at the same time (a couple of weeks later, in fact) that he was winning the Euroleague Next Generation Tournament against players two years his senior.

That season he also played for Slovenia for the first time in an U16 friendly tournament. And the last until 2017, a break he invested in speeding up his training, and other countries, in trying to lure him.

Doncic had already decided to play for Slovenia, a country with barely two million people transformed into a European basketball powerhouse, instead of Spain, where he had been living since he was 13, and Serbia, the land of his fathers’ family roots.

Dragic, Slovenia’s star at the time, knew Doncic from his days at Olimpija, and has acted as a chaperone during his career. First in the national team, where they were roommates during the 2017 EuroBasket, and then in the NBA, where they haven’t shared a team yet but hours and hours of video calls instead.

Until 2017 Slovenia had never won a medal at EuroBasket, but had been a dangerous team for more than a decade: between 2005 and 2013 they strung together five consecutive EuroBasket quarter-finals (they were semi-finalists in 2009), and two in the World Cup. They only needed one more piece to reach the next level. And that was Doncic.

Dragic and Doncic got the team to the 2017 EuroBasket final, where Slovenia won the gold medal in an epic game against Serbia: in a testament to the team-mates around them, including Gasper Vidmar, Klemen Prepelic and Anthony Randolph, despite losing Doncic to an injury in the third quarter, and Dragic in the fourth, Slovenia fought back to win its first medal ever.

Dragic would be voted MVP and Doncic, at just 18, included in the All-Tournament Team.

“Even in the clutch moments, he was always smiling. He never feels the pressure. Never. It’s something that amazed me. He never feels the pressure. He always comes there like he’s outside with his friends playing a pick-up game. That’s how he’s playing and why he’s so successful because, you know, he’s got that confidence that he can do whatever he thinks,” Dragic told ESPN.

In fact, Doncic wears numbers 7 and 77 to pay homage to Vassilis Spanoulis, a recently retired Greek player who became legendary with his feats in the clutch. It’s not for nothing that they called him Kill Bill.

That same composure with which Doncic plays in the final minutes is the same that has marked every new step in his career. In a space of just 15 months, between 18 and 19 years old, he won the EuroBasket with Slovenia, the EuroLeague with Real Madrid as the MVP of the competition, and arrived in the NBA as the star and new franchise player for the Dallas Mavericks

That breakneck speed in his evolution has been made possible thanks to a unique talent to dictate games and manipulate defenses, a game vision that allows him to play two moves ahead of his rivals to find his way to the basket or the best positioned teammate. In his first friendly game of this summer, after four years without playing for Slovenia, he handed out 17 assists.

“I played with Larry Bird. For three years straight, I watched, and that was the feeling when you watched him every single night. Magic Johnson was the same kind of player. Really, LeBron James is the same kind of player, too. These guys can do anything on a basketball court,” Doncic’s former coach, Rick Carlisle, told ESPN.

Already established as one of the best players in the world, Luka Doncic now seeks the dream of getting Slovenia men's national basketball team to its first Olympics in Tokyo 2020.