Luka Doncic is the most clutch player in the NBA play-offs - he learnt it from the biggest club in football, Real Madrid

On the weekend, Doncic was fully focused on a contest taking place 4,700 miles from Dallas and nearly a week before Game 1 against the Boston Celtics. That would be the UEFA Champions League final, where his beloved Real Madrid beat Borussia Dortmund to claim a 15th win in the coveted trophy.

Doncic is no mere superfan. The 25-year-old Slovenian began his career with Real Madrid Baloncesto, the club’s basketball team, where he joined the junior squad as a 13-year-old. He then made his pro debut there at just 16. And by then, he was already steeped in a culture that would change him forever.

The snarling killer instinct and knack for comebacks he showed in a 4-1 conference finals win over the Minnesota Timberwolves, he says, is a direct result of Real’s ruthless philosophy: Victory is the only acceptable outcome. In fact, Madridistas will tell you, it’s practically preordained.

“I won there, so it kind of stays with you,” said Doncic, who took a personal visit from Real Madrid president Florentino Pérez during the first round of the playoffs. “Sometimes, you just remember those beautiful moments when you win.”

Real is by far the most successful team in European football history, winning the tournament now known as the Champions League a record 15 times thanks to Sunday morning (AEST)’s triumph.

But serial winning, it turns out, isn’t just a football thing. Real Madrid’s basketball team is also, well, the Real Madrid of the EuroLeague. (This is a club whose legendary coach Pedro Ferrandiz once said he retired from the game “because the titles were coming out of my ears.”)

Since the EuroLeague began in 1958, just three years after UEFA introduced soccer’s European Cup, Real has claimed 11 championships, with long stretches of dominance in the 1960s and 1970s. Next on the list are CSKA Moscow with eight titles and Greece’s Panathinaikos with seven.

Doncic won the 10th of those Euroleague crowns with Real on top of three Spanish championships between 2015 and 2018. During that time, Doncic became one of the most talked-about basketball prospects in the world, a myth of a player who could score and pass at will and saw the court like a chess grandmaster.

Doncic also inhabited a world where greatness was all around him. The trophy room inside the Santiago Bernabeu stadium is packed with more silverware than Sotheby’s. At Real’s annual Christmas dinner, the club’s football stars would mingle with their basketball counterparts. And when Doncic was 16, he found himself sitting at the same table as another relentless competitor with a gift for grabbing the spotlight, Cristiano Ronaldo. Doncic was so shy he didn’t say a single word.

Instead, he expressed himself on the basketball court, where the standards were stratospheric. Doncic might have been the best player anyone in Spain had ever seen, but Real demanded the same out of him as it did from anyone else: more.

“If I did not believe that he could be better, it would be a personal failure of mine,” his coach, Pablo Laso, said before Doncic became the No. 3 pick in the 2018 NBA draft. “I hope that Luka can always play better and I demand that he does more things on the court.”

These days, Doncic is delivering. In true Real Madrid fashion, he has simply refused to let the Mavericks lose.

Real’s football team reached the Champions League final by pulling off a late turnaround against Bayern Munich in the semi-finals, just as it did against Manchester City on its way to the title two seasons ago. But the list of spectacular comebacks goes on long enough that decades of Madrid supporters like Doncic have learned to expect miracles.

The difference for Doncic now is that he’s also in the business of producing them. In Game 2 against the Timberwolves, he launched a game-winning 3-pointer with just seconds left on the clock. In Game 5, he scored 36 points to send them home.

What makes his playoff exploits even more impressive is that he’s managed all of it while visibly soldiering through a knee injury. Though the pain sometimes has him limping up and down the floor, Doncic said earlier this month that he’d never even considered sitting out.

“I’d have to be unable to walk to miss one of these games,” he added. “It’s part of my Real Madrid DNA.”

-- The Wall Street Journal