Luka Dončić, basketball’s most effective derriere,

The Mavericks star, and particularly his defense, had been much maligned coming into Friday night’s Game 4. He quickly set the record straight

When Luka Dončić dropped 73 points on the Atlanta Hawks in January – the fourth highest individual points tally in NBA history – Dallas head coach Jason Kidd was asked whether his star player’s prodigious scoring feats threatened to disrupt the Mavericks’ gameplan. “He is the gameplan,” Kidd replied.

For much of these finals that gameplan, like the man it was centered on, seemed decidedly iffy. The Mavericks looked unbalanced, dangerously overreliant on their star guard pairing, and Dončić himself – nursing injuries to both knee and chest – was in the middle of a historic series stinker in defense, footage of him lazily swatting at the ball as the Celtics repeatedly blew by him on offense threatened to become the visual summary of the entire finals. But in Game 4, Dallas obliterated Boston by the third-largest margin of victory in NBA finals history, reversing the pattern of the series with scrambling, urgent basketball at both ends of the court; suddenly, it was the Mavericks, not the Celtics, authoring all the blow-bys, authoritative dunks in transition, and handy cameos off the bench. The sweep has been averted. A once-moribund series has come thrillingly to life. And most importantly, the Mavs’ main man is back.