HOUSTON — A boyish grin crossed Austin Reaves’ face as he was about to answer a reporter’s question about the team’s 22 forced turnovers, holding the Houston Rockets to just 12 points in the fourth quarter in Monday night’s 100-92 victory.
Like hearing a sibling shout an embarrassing phrase, Reaves turned away from Luka Doncic as the Slovenian star hollered above the locker room noise to answer for his teammate, who’ve developed a brother-like bond seen through light-hearted jokes and roughhousing on the court during pregame warmups since Doncic’s arrival in the league-shattering trade in 2025.
“Luka was locking (expletive) up,” Doncic said.
As the laughter subsided in the Toyota Center visitor’s locker room, Reaves answered the defensive prompt.
“That was it,” Reaves sarcastically said. “That was it. (Doncic) gets all the credit.”
Reaves would go on to say that the Lakers “guarded with five guys,” that their rotations were “sharp,” and shut down the Houston Rockets 37-year-old star Kevin Durant, who turned the ball over five times while shooting 1 for 5 from the field across the entire second half – all of which could be confirmed with the eye test alone Monday. But Reaves’ comment, albeit in a joking manner, highlights what Lakers coach JJ Redick has said numerous times since March began.
Redick believes that Doncic, who leads the NBA with 32.9 points per game, to go along with 8.5 assists and 7.9 rebounds per game, isn’t being talked about enough.
In NBA.com’s most recent MVP ladder, a subjective ranking of the top candidates for the league’s top individual honor, Doncic is fourth on the list below reigning MVP Oklahoma City Thunder guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, San Antonio Spurs positional unicorn Victor Wembanyama and Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic. Basketball Reference’s MVP Award Tracker, an unbiased statistical model, shares the probability of each player vying for MVP.
As of Tuesday morning, Doncic lands at third in the model with a 3.6% chance of winning his first career MVP award.
“I’m not sure,” Redick said when asked why he felt Doncic is being overlooked. “I was looking at it the other day. I thought he had, for him, for his standards, had a three-week stretch where he didn’t play really good basketball. Coming back from Slovenia through the holidays (for the birth of his second daughter) and that also coincided with AR getting hurt and us after a hot start losing some games. Maybe we, him, just got written off.”
Redick continued: “But he’s been great for two and a half months. He’s the engine for us. We wouldn’t be in the position we’re in without his playmaking, his leadership, his defense. I mean, he’s doing everything for us.”
When asked if he takes pride in performing in playoff-like atmospheres, an intense matchup against the franchise that now sits just 1½ games below them in the standings, Doncic said “of course” he does.
“Obviously, we have another one (against the Rockets) on Wednesday (at 6:30 p.m. PT), but it was a very important game,” Doncic said. “We’ve been playing very good. Our defense has been pretty good, so just got to continue that way.”
As the Lakers’ defense has improved, so has Doncic’s. Across the Lakers’ six-game winning streak, Doncic has recorded the second-best defensive rating (a metric that measures how many points a player allows per 100 possessions) with a 105.1 rating. Only guard Marcus Smart, a former NBA Defensive Player of the Year, ranks higher than Doncic over the past six games.
Doncic’s defensive rating across the season is more than 10 points higher at 115.3. And it’s not as if Doncic is slowing down his scoring totals. In the four games before the Lakers’ winning streak began, Doncic scored fewer than 30 points in each outing. Since then, Doncic has scored at least 30 points per game, averaging 37.8 points per game while shooting 48.7% from the field and 40.2% from beyond the arc.
The Rockets hold the third-best defensive rating in the West, behind only the Thunder and Spurs, who sit atop the conference. Against that defense, Doncic’s 36 points proved to be enough firepower for the Lakers to down Houston on Monday.
“Luka Magic, baby,” Smart said. “We all know it. We all seen it. We’ve all experienced it. Me personally, I’ve been on both ends. I’ve been on the end where he’s in that zone against me. And now on the end where I’m watching from his teammate to help him get in that zone and keep going.”
Lakers at Houston
When: 6:30 p.m. PT Wednesday
Where: Toyota Center, Houston
TV/radio: Spectrum Sportsnet/ESPN LA 710