Luka Doncic thought his crazy shot to tie Knicks was actually a game-winner: ‘I didn’t know what to do’

Luka Doncic made basketball magic Tuesday night, becoming the first player in NBA history to record a 60-point, 20-rebound triple-double with a 60-21-10 line that might honestly never be topped. In the process, he managed to rally the Mavericks from a nine-point deficit with 33 seconds to play to force overtime, where they eventually finished off the Knicks, 126-121. 

“I’m tired as hell,” Doncic said afterward. Of course he was. He had to play five minutes longer than he expected! Turns out, Doncic thought he had hit the game-winner in regulation, when in fact his miraculous bucket, which we’ll get to shortly, only tied the score. 

It went like this: With Dallas trailing by three, Doncic went to the the free-throw line for a pair of shots. He sunk the first, trimming the deficit to two. He then expertly missed the second on purpose, somehow wound up with his own pin-balling rebound and threw it in without so much as coming back to earth. Watch his reaction after the make. 

Yep, that is the reaction of a guy who thought he had just won the game. 

Doncic was asked if his antics after the basket were a celebration or a call to his teammates to foul, which, whether they were tied or in the lead, would have been a catastrophe. 

“Well, it was celebrating,” Doncic said, if you can’t open the tweet above. “But, honestly, a lot of people asked me about this back in the locker room. I thought we won it. So when I went to the crowd like this, I thought we had won the game. But when I saw the score, I was like, ‘Oh.’ I didn’t know what to do.”

First of all, don’t ever let Luka fool you into thinking he didn’t know what to do on a basketball court. Second, forgive the man for getting the score confused. Sequences like this don’t exactly happen every day. Over the last 20 years, in fact, 13,885 teams trailed a game by at least nine with 35 or fewer seconds to play, and the Mavericks are the only one to come back to win. Or, the Knicks are the only team to fumble away such a lead. However you want to look at it. 

To me, it’s the former. This was all about Luka. The Knicks didn’t melt down. They didn’t start throwing the ball all over the place and tripping over their own feet. Quentin Grimes allowed himself to be tied up after an inbound, and Immanuel Quickley neglected to box out Doncic on a crucial put-back, but these are not typically catastrophic mistakes with a comfortable lead to work with. Problem is, Luka Doncic is not typical. He is a magician, and the Knicks simply found themselves as a prop in his historic show.