LOS ANGELES — The Luka Dončić arriving in Los Angeles on September 28 is not the same player the Lakers had to carry off a Denver court six months earlier.
The Grade 2 hamstring strain that ended his 2025–26 season on April 2 did not arrive at a convenient moment—hamstring injuries rarely do. With 15 regular-season games remaining and the Lakers having already won their first-round series against Houston, Dončić went down in Denver.
Over the following weeks, Los Angeles watched the Oklahoma City Thunder finish what the injury had begun, sweeping the Lakers in four games in the second round.
He is coming back lighter. Long-time personal trainer Anze Macek, who has traveled between Slovenia and Los Angeles with Doncic since the Dallas years, ran the recovery program and then pivoted to conditioning work that has brought Doncic to approximately 105 kilograms (roughly 230 pounds, down from his listed 240) for the first time in his career with the Lakers. Yahoo Sports reported that footage from Slovenia workouts showed a visibly different version of the six-time All-Star, one that fans and observers described as the leanest Doncic they had seen in his NBA career. Macek was not asked to produce a moment for social media. He was asked to produce a player who can log 35 minutes a night for 70 games.
The minicamp Doncic organized in Ljubljana from August 20 to August 24 tells you something about where his head is going into training camp. Nine new players arrived on the roster this summer. The Lakers, moving into their first season in seven years without LeBron James, have committed to a construction project that places Doncic at the center of everything. But a construction project with nine new walls and one foundation is not automatically a building. Doncic did the arithmetic and invited his new teammates to his home country to do the math together.
Workouts. Golf. Lake Bled. Yahoo Sports published footage of the Lakers in the lake’s famous blue water, kayaking in Lakers yellow. “I took a real break from basketball the first few weeks after the season ended to rehab my body,” Doncic wrote in a message to fans. The break was real. So, it appears, is the return.
The question the Slovenia trip could not answer is whether this version of the Lakers, with Doncic lighter and nine rebuilt pieces and a roster that cohered briefly over four days at Lake Bled, actually resolves the underlying tension of his time in Los Angeles. His first full season was statistically exceptional and organizationally disrupted. He led the league in scoring. He navigated a mid-season roster overhaul. He pulled his hamstring while the franchise was six weeks from meaningful playoff basketball. Good players do not automatically make winning teams. Healthy good players alongside the right configuration of other good players make winning teams. The Lakers have the first condition confirmed and the second still in negotiation as of September 29.
Across the conference, the same pre-camp reckoning is playing out for teams built around franchise players managing their distance from last season’s exit. As The Eastern Herald reported this week, Stephen Curry’s Li-Ning tour in Beijing generated a ten-second clip that spread quickly through NBA circles, raising questions about Golden State’s health picture entering camp. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, Anthony Edwards and LaMelo Ball have been candid about the uncertainty of fitting two ball-dominant stars into a single system. The Western Conference in 2026-27 will be decided, in part, by which of these fragile pre-camp bets actually holds.
Doncic’s version of the bet has the advantage of a clean bill of health. His hamstring is not the story. That commitment to the conditioning work, from the Slovenia sessions to the weight management to the four-day team investment in a country most of his teammates had never visited, suggests the lesson from Denver landed somewhere useful.
Training camp opens September 29 at the Lakers’ facility. The Slovenia trip bought four days of familiarity with nine new people. A full NBA regular season will either confirm or contradict everything those four days implied. Three body parts go into camp carrying history. The ankle. The hamstring. The knee. Each has, at different points, produced the same anxious waiting. Each begins its audition on September 29.
He will be 27 when the season starts. He is supposed to be in the absolute prime window of a Hall of Fame career. He might be. The minicamp footage suggests he is. The only thing the weight loss and the Slovenia kayaking and the message to fans could not deliver is what only November through June can confirm: that this Doncic, the lighter one, the one who came home with his teammates, is also the durable one.
That answer begins in two weeks.
