Earlier on in his NBA career, Miami Heat legend Dwyane Wade consistently saw a whole lot of playing time. He averaged 36-plus minutes of action per game in six of his first seven seasons in the league.
But as Wade got up there in age, Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra began to roll back the guard’s minutes. After the 2010-11 campaign, Wade never averaged more than 34.7 minutes per game in any one season in Miami, yet he was still a very productive player and earned six more All-Star nods with the Heat.
Wade has called on Los Angeles Lakers head coach J.J. Redick to follow Spoelstra’s modus operandi and cut Doncic’s minutes so that the storied franchise can get the best out of the Slovenian.
“This a conversation that I had with Spo over the years, and I didn’t like it” Wade said. “Because as a player, you want to be out there your max minutes. But as I got a little — not older in my 30s, but as I started getting older Spo would take my minutes down, and he was like, ‘You’re going to be more productive in the least amount of minutes because you out there getting rest because you’re doing so much on offense.’
“So, I gotta look at J.J., and I gotta say, ‘J.J., you have to make sure that you looking at Luka not just because he’s so great with the ball that you just keeping him on the floor all the time. You may have to cut back Luka’s minutes a little bit. Doesn’t mean his scoring gonna go down, ’cause he scores at a high clip anyway.”
Considering the Lakers earned a blowout victory over the Utah Jazz on Monday, Doncic didn’t play all that much in his team debut, at least not for a player who averages 34.9 minutes per game for his NBA career.
The floor general logged less than 24 minutes of action and finished with 14 points on 5-of-14 shooting from the floor and 1-of-7 from deep in his first game playing alongside forward LeBron James.
Though Doncic is only one game into his Lakers tenure, Redick has done a good job of heeding Wade’s advice to this point. It’s within the realm of possibility that Doncic won’t play an overwhelming amount in the next game on the Lakers’ schedule either. Los Angeles will take on the Jazz once again on Wednesday, and that game has the potential to be another lopsided affair with Utah owning the second-worst record in the West.
It’ll be worth keeping tabs on how many minutes Doncic will average in a Lakers uniform this season in light of all of the question marks surrounding his commitment to being in shape during his time with the Dallas Mavericks. Perhaps Doncic will be extra motivated to be in peak physical condition moving forward in light of all the reports that surfaced after he was dealt to the Lakers indicating that he had conditioning issues with his old team.
