New NBA Offseason Propaganda Has Dropped And This Time It's Luka Doncic Putting In Work At The Gym

David Berding. Getty Images.

Once June rolls around in the NBA calendar, it tends to mean a few things. First, we have the Finals which is obviously awesome, but it also means that for the rest of the NBA it's time to start putting out offseason workout videos. Sometimes it can be an injury update like we saw with Dame and Tatum, but most of the times it's high level offseason propaganda from players who had to hear a whole lot of shit during the season as some sort of "I'll show you!" approach.

Ben Simmons is famous for this approach. Every NBA season, he would be dragged for not being able or willing to shoot any sort of jumper, especially a 3PA. So what would happen every offseason? Our timelines would be flooded with Ben Simmons playing in open runs while taking and making 3s with confidence. Everyone would then predict that this would be the year he finally changed, only for nothing to actually be different once the season rolled around. 

You can bet your ass we're going to see the same thing happen this season from a wide variety of players. The NBA offseason is when you push the propaganda. That's how it has always worked and how it will always work.

Which brings us to Luka Doncic's version of the Ben Simmons 3P shooting issue. 

When the #1 talking point about you is how fat and out of shape you are and how detrimental that is to your team and why you'll never win, what do you do in the summer? You put out workout videos. This is the same exact thing as seeing Ben Simmons take a pull up 3 in a gym against randoms, and my guess is it's having the same effect. You look at the replies and QTs of that tweet and it's a whole lot of "get ready NBA!!" type of comments, similar to what we saw with Simmons.

The thing is, Luka was also indirectly (but directly) called out by his head coach after the season

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It doesn't exactly take a rocket scientist to see that Luka wasn't in the best shape last year. And while Mavs fans always tried to make excuses for it which then turned into Lakers fans making excuses for it, we all have eyes. We all see him on defense. We all see how he labors through games. You could make the case that part of his injury issues can be traced back to his conditioning. Even someone like Nikola Jokic who doesn't "look" like he's in shape, I mean he's not exactly built like Giannis, but the dude never gets tired. For Luka, there really isn't anything basketball wise he needs to work on, the dude is a basketball savant. All that really needs to change is his conditioning and his give a shit meter on the defensive end, and something tells me those things may be related. 

Now that Luka is putting these videos out there, he now faces the same challenge as when Ben Simmons used to do it with his outside shot. Either make sure this translates to the actual season, or you'll never beat the allegations. Sure, Luka may be in the gym and looks like he's slimming down, but if we get to the season and he's still out of shape or dogs it on defense? That's going to become a permanent knock on who he is as a player that he'll never be able to shake, regardless of how many workout videos come out. You can't just do it in the offseason, you also have to do it in October, November, December, January, February, March, April, and if you're lucky, May and June. 

It also had to be pretty awkward in that Lakers locker room considering how dedicated LeBron is to being in shape and in peak conditioning even at his age, so if he can do it then Luka has no excuses, so at least we have video evidence of him attempting to improve in these areas. It's been so long that I'm not sure people really remember how awesome younger, skinnier Luka was in his early Mavs days. He was dunking left and right, he was quick, he was a completely different player than we see today. If he can find a way to get back to that guy while also adding everything else he's developed in his game over the years, that's a pretty decent player if you ask me