Redick has settled on his verdict after Doncic put up another oversized night in purple and gold. The Slovenian guard dropped 45 points, a season-high 15 rebounds, six assists, five steals and eight three-pointers on the Toronto Raptors on Sunday night, a stat line NBA record-keepers had never seen before in a single game.
The Lakers won 131-125, and the head coach was already running out of fresh adjectives.
“It feels pretty normal. I mean, we got to witness it for a month last year, and it was like a supernova. It was loud. It feels loud right now,” Redick said of Doncic’s offensive run, per The Sporting News via Yahoo Sports.
Through six games this season, Doncic is averaging 37.7 points, 8.2 rebounds, 7.3 assists and 1.8 steals. The 45-point outburst was his fourth straight game with at least 37 points, extending his early lead in the NBA scoring race.
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A reference point from last spring
Redick’s “month last year” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It points back to the Doncic the Lakers inherited mid-season, when the former Dallas Mavericks star arrived in Los Angeles and immediately rearranged what the team looked like on offense. The coach is saying, in effect, that nothing about November has outpaced what he saw in the spring.
That is a quiet raising of the bar. “Pretty normal” is not a compliment most NBA coaches would reach for after a 45-point, 15-rebound game. From Redick, it is the frame: this is the baseline now, not the ceiling.
Officiating complaints alongside the praise
The win was not clean. The Lakers coughed up 24 turnovers, and Redick spent part of the postgame diagnosing why.
“We scored 131 with 24 turnovers. Some of those turnovers are because we’re like legitimately getting fouled,” Redick said after the game, per Fadeaway World.
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He picked up a technical for arguing a no-call on a Doncic drive in the fourth quarter, per the same account, after the Slovenian finished off the layup for his 39th point of the night. The complaint about Toronto’s physicality sat next to the praise for Doncic rather than cancelling it: Redick’s point was that his star put up a historic line while being grabbed on most possessions.
Where this leaves the Lakers in early November
Doncic’s 45 came in Los Angeles’ sixth game of the season, a stretch that has already included a late collapse against the Golden State Warriors. The Toronto win reset the mood at Crypto.com Arena with the roster now built around a guard his coach has stopped calling surprising.
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