Basketball is not a sport, it's a way of life.

Luka goes loco, Angel is rebounding like a demon, the Sun sure are shining bright...

• Well, stop me if you’ve heard this before: In his performance Thursday night, Luka Dončić joined some ultra-elite company of playoff performers. In this instance, on his way to eviscerating the Timberwolves in the first twelve minutes of the Mavericks game five victory, Luka became just one of 18 players in NBA history to score 20 or more points, while making 4 or more three-pointers, and shooting over 70% from the field in a single quarter. Now, I know that any of us who watch the game with a historical lens is aware that because of the post-Steph paradigm shift regarding three-point shooting, the scope of the accomplishment becomes a bit more shallow in terms of significance. I also know that any of us who watched that first quarter Thursday walked away fully aware that this dude was doing something historically punctuative, and I don’t just mean that “Slovenian” he was caught shouting to a fan after hitting another big shot to end the quarter.

  Here is the list of players who have been able to match those numbers for a quarter in playoff history. (*Shoutout to Kirk Hinrich for clearly being before his time and to Goran Dragić for being the only player on this list to come off the bench to wreak this type of havoc.)

  Even if I eliminate the three-point makes as a component of refinement, in the entire history of the league, only 62 players have ever had a quarter of that type of efficient dominance (20+ points on 70% or greater shooting). According to Stat Muse, there have been a total of 8,864 playoff games played in NBA history. This means that 35,456 quarters of playoff basketball have ever been played (excluding overtimes as they are obviously not full periods), and Luka was able to accomplish something that has occurred 0.0017% of the time in the history of the NBA. To that, all I can say is: To je prekleto impresivno! (Parental advisory for those who look that up.)

• Don’t look now, but the Connecticut Sun are off to a scorching start. After a big win Friday against the Dallas Wings, the Sun are now only the 12^th team in WNBA history to begin a season 7-0. This is a good sign for Sun fans, as 10 of those 11 teams before them made it to the WNBA Finals that same year. (The Sun themselves have already made the Finals two of the last five years, losing in ’19 to the Washington Mystics and then in ’22 to the Aces.) This season, Connecticut is riding an extremely balanced attack offensively—the team essentially has all five starters averaging double figures: Bonner – 19.1, Thomas – 14.6, Jones – 13.7, Carrington – 12.6, Harris – 9.9—to the second-best offensive rating in the league at 104.5 (LVA – 104.8), while defensively ranking as the second stingiest unit with a defensive rating of 92.8 (MIN – 92.7). The Sun being this balanced of a unit shouldn’t be surprising considering that the franchise is led by their do-it-all forward Alyssa Thomas, who, after finishing second in MVP voting and second in Defensive Player of the Year voting last season, continues her multi-dimensional attack this year. The 11-year pro out of Maryland, who plays with a style that one would kindly describe as rugged, is averaging 14.6 points (21^st), 9.0 rebounds (7^th), 8.7 assists (1^st), 1.7 steals (tied-16^th), .9 blocks (23^rd), on a career-best 52.2% (tied-20^th) from the field. To say Thomas does it all is like saying Bill Walton was important to the game of basketball—sure, it’s accurate, however the magnitude of the impact requires far more effusive phrasing. Also like Walton, Thomas exists in the uniquely rarefied air of those whose model of play has a near universally positive impact on every moment of the game. Really, if there were any nits to be picked where Thomas’s game is concerned, it would be her 66.7% from the free throw line (tied – 80^th). But considering that she has torn the labrums in both of her shoulders, I think we can forgive the one flaw in an otherwise pristine game.

• Going into these 2024 NBA Finals, there is no shortage of intriguing storylines: