I Only Saw the Last 10 Minutes of Mavs-Lakers and I Declare it a Classic

We know Luka Doncic is a star. Now we know it doesn't matter who he's up against.

I went to the Bulls-Pistons game in Chicago on Friday night. Needless to say, it wasn't very good basketball. The kind of basketball you watch purely because it is, by definition, still basketball.

Afterwards at home, I got a notification from the NBA app that the Mavs-Lakers game was tied 92-92 with 5 minutes to go in the fourth quarter. That was very good basketball.

Luka Doncic, who couldn't rely on a streaky Kristaps Porzingis, was commandeering an offense of rotation players to battle step-for-step with the Lakers (LA is actually built similarly to Dallas, except with experience and, well, LeBron and Anthony Davis as your superstar duo). In primetime, against the star-studded Lakers, the 20-year-old Doncic knew exactly where he was and showed no fear.

He continually put the Mavs ahead with free throws and flashed a nice alley-oop to Dwight Powell. LeBron had a ferocious slam and AD was draining turnarounds in between. Step for step.

Following a missed shot with under 2 minutes to go, Dwight Howard caught the back of Doncic's head running back, and the superstar guard was bloodied and visibly shaken. A minute of game time later, Doncic was in there. He blew by AD, drew help defense, and found Dorian Finney-Smith loitering in the corner for a wide-open, go-ahead triple.

On the final play of regulation, LeBron slides around his man on the baseline, finds Danny Green is his homeland, the right corner, for a game-tying 3 to go to overtime. But a fantastic play was tainted by a missed foul on Howard, who was tugging on Seth Curry trying to maneuver around his back screen. Curry was off balance in contesting Green's three.

From there, the Lakers pulled ahead for the win. It concluded a sophisticated and beautiful verse of basketball conducted by the game's best virtuosos. A masterpiece. We learned that LeBron James is not washed (shame to those who did thought that, though I know it's not many of you, right?) and that he can still have LeBron James games. Luka Doncic proved that he can hang with LeBron and AD on his lonesome. He will always be compared to Trae Young because of the draft night trade, but he deserves to be compared pound-for-pound against the league's greats already.

A crazy stat I saw: LeBron and Luka became the oldest and youngest players to record a 30-10-15 statline. In the same game! James went up to him after the final buzzer and called him a "bad mother f--cker", which I assume is the greatest thing you can be called in this world (from LeBron only).

Luka, of course, is still not in the same stratosphere as The King. No one is. That includes Kawhi. In just the game before Doncic only put up 12-4-5 in a winning effort over the Nuggets that included 9 double-digit Mavs. But he is one of the most cerebral stars to be drafted into the league since LeBron, just like Kawhi.

On Friday, that was on full display. Old meeting new. Made history vs. making history. The Lakers win may ultimately mean nothing except showing that both teams are legit this season. I saw the groundwork being laid for a new generation of stars duking it out. To me, that's a classic.