LJUBLJANA — Ziaire Williams did not know anyone on the flight.
Four days later, he had everyone’s number.
That is what Luka Doncic paid for, and it was not an incidental byproduct of the four-day minicamp he funded and hosted in Slovenia from August 20 to 24. It was the point. A 27-year-old star bought the chartered flights, covered the accommodations, arranged gift bags, set up dinners at his favorite restaurant in Ljubljana, organized a fishing trip to Lake Bled and an afternoon of golf in the Slovenian capital, and asked nothing in return beyond showing up. What he was purchasing was not extra reps in a gym. He was buying time, shared and unscheduled, for sixteen strangers who would open training camp in three weeks as teammates.
“It was great and super fun,” Williams said in an interview with Sports Illustrated. “A lot of planning and logistics went into it. He was a great host.” Williams, who signed a one-year deal with the Lakers after two seasons with the Brooklyn Nets, described the transformation more plainly: the team went into the trip not knowing each other and left with players reaching out by text, comfortable in a way that typically takes months of a regular season to manufacture. That shift was Doncic’s specific investment, as Bleacher Report detailed in its reporting on the minicamp.
Sixteen of the Lakers’ 17 players made the trip, as Yahoo Sports reported. The exception was 2026 first-round pick Cameron Carr, who was required to attend the NBA’s mandatory rookie orientation program and could not be released from it. Every other player, including Austin Reaves, Walker Kessler, Bronny James, Dalton Knecht, Jarred Vanderbilt, Jake LaRavia and the newly-signed arrivals Quentin Grimes, Collin Sexton, Matisse Thybulle, Sandro Mamukelashvili and Kevon Looney alongside Williams, made the flight. ESPN’s Dave McMenamin first reported the minicamp. The subsequent images and video that filtered out of Ljubljana were notable for their ordinariness: players on a golf course, at a dinner table, on a gym floor in a city most of them would have struggled to find on a map two months before.
The workouts happened. Sets were run, shots were taken, conditioning work was done in Ljubljana’s late-summer heat. But the basketball was largely beside the point. Bronny James described the experience as Doncic finding “the right places in Slovenia to see the most out of the country,” hooking teammates up at every turn. What Doncic was doing was not running a practice. He was being a host in the fullest sense, deploying his hometown as a platform for something the league’s formal preseason structure cannot provide: unguarded time between players who are still deciding how much to trust each other.
That wager carries a cost the Lakers cannot fully assess in September. Player-organized trips are not unheard of in the NBA, but this one went further than most. Doncic chartered the plane, covered the accommodations, coordinated four days of activities across two cities and handed his new teammates an experience nobody had reason to expect. Jarred Vanderbilt posted video from the workouts showing the team on the court together, moving with purpose. What was visible was routine. What was missing was telling: the hesitation, the social navigation of a locker room not yet formed.
Should the wager fail, should the team never develop the cohesion four days in Ljubljana was designed to seed, nobody will reference Slovenia when the narrative sours. Should the Lakers come out of training camp looking like a unit with some genuine connection behind it, the minicamp footage becomes the first exhibit in the explanation.
The NBA’s other preseason storylines this September have carried less optimism. Stephen Curry’s limp during his China trip put the Warriors on alert before their own training camp, while Kawhi Leonard’s unsigned trade situation left Toronto in uncertainty heading into the same window. Against that backdrop, Doncic’s willingness to invest in his team, personally and financially, reads as something different from standard franchise preparation.
Official training camp opens September 29. The first preseason game is October 5 against the Sacramento Kings. By then, the Slovenia question will have an early answer: was this a team that happened to spend four days in Ljubljana, or a team that was built there? The Lakers have produced promising Septembers before, and Doncic has not yet shown how he leads when outcomes fall short of expectations.
What he showed in Slovenia is that he knows how to put something of his own on the line. Whether the season rewards that investment is the question that will define the next eight months.
