That one time I was right

"Keep your eye on this kid from Slovenia," I said to the guy. "He's gonna be special."

This was a couple of years ago and the guy was a bartender who'd played basketball at a local high school (and whom I'd actually covered during my sportswriter days), and we were talking about the upcoming NBA draft. And here's the part where you can leave the room if you don't like hearing someone blow his own trumpet, because that's kinda what I'm gonna do here.

That's a rare thing for me, by the way. I don't often blow my own trumpet because you only do that sort of thing when you were right about something. And I'm hardly ever right about anything.

This time I was. Because the kid from Slovenia?

His name was Luka Doncic.

I'd heard his name because he was expected to go in the top five in the NBA draft that year, and he was, like, 19 years old or something. And he'd been playing in the top European pro league since he was, like, 16.

That got my attention. So I dialed up a clip of his YouTube highlights and ...

"A young Larry Bird," I told the bartender. "That's what I was looking at."

Well, it's a couple years later now, and everyone knows who Luka Doncic is. And he seems more like a young Larry Bird than ever.

That's because he hit the NBA as a rookie like he'd been playing there forever, and this year he took it up about six more notches. His Dallas Mavericks were just eliminated by the heavily favored Clippers in the NBA's Weird Thrown-Together Summer Thing playoffs, but not before Doncic did some things. Like, you know, Larry Bird things.

In the first playoff game of his career, for instance, he dropped 42 points on the Clips, the highest-scoring playoff debut in NBA history.

Then he put on a show out of legend in Game 4, going for 43 points, 17 rebounds and 13 assists and flushing a buzzer-beating triple to win the game in overtime. And did it all on a sprained ankle that had put his availability in question.

Finally he went for 38 points, nine assists and nine boards trying to keep the Mavs alive in the closeout game.

Now everyone knows who Luka Doncic is. Now they're calling him the NBA's next great star and a future Hall of Famer and lord knows what else in this age of hyperbole. One scribbler even said we'd witnessed the beginning of the Age of Luka.

I don't know about that. But it's a safe bet he's now entered the First-Name Basis Zone.

Larry. Michael. Shaq. Kobe. LeBron. Giannis.

Luka.

Keep your eye on him. Keep your eye on this kid from Slovenia.