For many NBA players, especially international ones, the offseason is filled with just as much basketball as the regular season. That has certainly been the case for Los Angeles Lakers superstar Luka Doncic, whose Slovenian National Team responsibilities often gives him little time to recover once the NBA season ends.
This offseason was different, however, as Doncic had more time to recover and he and his team used that to completely transform his body. In fact, the Lakers superstar revealed that he didn’t touch a basketball for a full month after the season ended, via Andrew Heffernan and Ebenezer Samuel of Men’s Health:
The hardest part of Luka’s offseason program came at the start. Shortly after the run of tests in May revealed that he was fully healthy, Barrio told him to quit playing basketball for a full month. “Just to avoid the basketball court for one month in this offseason,” Barrio says. “We let them put the ball away. We just were doing some other kinds of things.”
The goal: For the first time in years, Dončić would let his body recover completely from the constant pounding of basketball. The summer before, in 2024, Luka had found little time to breathe. Since the Mavs had made the NBA Finals, he’d played into mid-June. Then, just weeks later, he suited up for the Slovenian national team in an Olympic qualifying tournament, eventually losing to Greece in the semis.
This summer, Team Luka’s had three full months to rebuild Dončić. So they dared to eliminate court time—and he disagreed at first. But he quickly filled the time with a weights routine that helped him build total-body strength. And he eventually found a distraction playing pickleball and padel (think: pickleball meets squash), sometimes against friends, sometimes with Barrio and Maček. For Dončić, the new games were a blast from his childhood past, long before he fell in love with basketball. They challenged new muscles, relieving his knees, thanks to fewer vertical jumps, while strengthening adductors, glutes, and ankles with footwork. “At the beginning, it was hard,” he says. “I can’t be without basketball. But when I was a little kid, I played a lot of sports.” He channeled that era—and maintained his competitive fire. “There were a lot of angry moments, too, when we would lose,” he says. “But I didn’t lose much.”
It had to have been extremely difficult for Luka to just not play basketball for that long, especially since he has been doing this since a young age. To not be on the court was probably torture at first, but he would find a way to fill that competitive void while also getting in the best shape possible.
Ideally, this has allowed Doncic’s body to recover and be prepared for the grind of the regular season, his first full year in a Lakers uniform, where he plans on taking this team to the next level and compete for a championship.
Lakers’ Luka Doncic inspired by Kobe Bryant & Michael Jordan in offseason workouts
Luka Doncic has put in a lot of work this offseason to get into the best shape of his career and he was inspired in the workouts by two of the most maniacal workers the NBA has ever seen in Lakers legend Kobe Bryant and Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan.
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