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Lakers guard Luka Doncic will miss the rest of the regular season with a Grade 2 hamstring injury.
Luka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers suffered a measure of insult added to his lingering hamstring injury this weekend, as his name was noticeably absent from multiple finalist lists for prominent NBA awards.
The league released the final three candidates for all of its major regular-season honors to coincide with the beginning of the playoffs. Beyond one of three All-NBA teams, on which Doncic is highly likely to earn a spot when the league announces them later this year, Doncic had a strong case to be included as a finalist for two awards: Most Valuable Player and Clutch Player of the Year.
However, he didn’t finish in the top three of voting for either of them.
The three finalists for MVP are centers Nikola Jokic of the Denver Nuggets and Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs as well as point guard Shai Gilgeous-Alexander of the Oklahoma City Thunder who won it last year.
Jamal Murray of the Nuggets and Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves joined Alexander on the list of finalists for the Clutch Player of the Year Award in 2025-26.
GettyLuka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers.
The NBA recently ruled in favor of the Doncic, deeming him eligible for its awards in 2025-26 despite playing in just 64 games rather than the 65 contests required to qualify under a recent league rule.
His challenge fell under the “extraordinary circumstances” clause, as Doncic missed two games for the birth of his second child.
So while Doncic is eligible for MVP and has certainly received a number of top-five votes, it is now clear that he won’t win. Joseph Zucker of Bleacher Report contended that Doncic’s inclusion on the ballot won’t likely impact the eventual winner, either, nor will that of Detroit Pistons star Cade Cunningham.
“Their inclusions are unlikely to alter the outcome for MVP,” Zucker wrote. “In the final straw poll from ESPN’s Tim Bontemps, Gilgeous-Alexander was the runaway winner with 88 first-place votes. Wembanyama was next with eight votes.”
Doncic led the league in scoring average this season, pouring in 33.5 points nightly on 47.6 shooting (22.8 attempts per game) and 36.6 percent from behind the 3-point line (10.8 tries per contest). He added 8.3 assists, 7.7 rebounds and 1.6 steals per outing and led the Lakers to the No. 4 seed in the Western Conference.
GettyLuka Doncic of the Los Angeles Lakers.
The Lakers played in 30 clutch games this season, defined as any contest in which the two teams’ total scores are within five points of one another least once in last five minutes of regulation or overtime.
Los Angeles finished 22-8 in such games over the course of the campaign on its way to a 53-29 record. That translates to a 73.3 percent win rate, which led the league.
Doncic was the team’s highest-usage player (38.5 percent), meaning he had the basketball in his hands more frequently and the offense ran through him more often than any of his teammates, including Austin Reaves (26.9 percent) and four-time MVP/four-time champion LeBron James (28.1 percent).
And while all three contributed to clutch winning, Doncic was the best clutch team’s go-to option whenever he was on the floor, including during the end of close contests. Thus, his lack of inclusion on the list of clutch finalists reads like a meaningful omission.
Doncic went down with a hamstring strain on April 2 and could potentially return at some point during the Lakers’ first-round playoff series against the Houston Rockets. L.A. captured Game 1 at home on Saturday night by a score of 107-98.
Max Dible covers the NFL, NBA and MLB for Heavy.com, with a focus on the Green Bay Packers, Minnesota Vikings, Chicago Bears and Cleveland Browns. He covered local and statewide news as a reporter for West Hawaii Today and served as news director for BigIslandNow.com and Pacific Media Group's family of Big Island radio stations before joining Heavy. More about Max Dible
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