Last night, the Los Angeles Lakers snapped a three-game losing streak with a 120-119 win over the Indiana Pacers, who had been on a five-game winning streak of their own entering the contest. It wasn’t convincing; Los Angeles blew an 11-point halftime advantage and needed a LeBron James tip-in — the eighth game-winning buzzer beater of his storied career — to escape with the victory.
Tonight, the Lakers will have an opportunity to exact revenge against the Chicago Bulls, against whom they gave up 146 points on Saturday in James’ return from a groin strain. Despite it being the second night of a back-to-back, both James and Luka Dončić are expected to play, perhaps a sign of Los Angeles’ urgency, two and a half games behind the West’s No. 2 seed with 10 games left in its season.
On DraftKings Sportsbook, the Lakers are 3.5-point favorites and the total is set for 236. Below, I’ve highlighted my favorite prop bets centered around Dončić.
Best Luka Dončić Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Luka Dončić 12+ First-Quarter Points (+135)
Dončić typically uses the first quarter to gauge how much he’s feeling it on any given night, so he leads the league in opening-frame usage rate this season before ranking fifth in each of the following three quarters among players who have played at least 300 total minutes in each quarter this season. This has been especially true since arriving in Los Angeles; Dončić has posted a gargantuan 39.6% usage rate in the first quarter since he made his Lakers debut on February 10, nearly five percentage points more than the next-highest player, Memphis Grizzlies point guard Ja Morant. Across that span, he’s averaging 10.7 points per game in the opening frame, a figure that jumps to 12.0 if you remove his first three games with the team, in which he was still clearly hampered by the calf strain that had sidelined him since Christmas Day.
Given the Bulls’ defensive profile — they’ve allowed the third-most points per game this season — it might be cautious to even consider that Dončić might score only 12 points in the opening frame. After all, even in that blowout defeat, he did drop 17 points in the first quarter, making five of his eight field goal attempts and three of his five three-pointers, accounting for more than half of Los Angeles’ points despite taking fewer than one-third of its shots. With Rui Hachimura out tonight — likely to be replaced in the starting five by the lower-usage Dorian Finney-Smith — Dončić should fire away at will early.
Luka Dončić O16.5 Assists + Rebounds (-115)
Strangely enough, while virtually every team in the East below the eighth-seeded Orlando Magic are tanking to improve their lottery odds, Chicago has been winning. It has gone 10-7 since the All-Star break, and even its awful defense has gotten somewhat better. Point guard Josh Giddey is in a contract year and has made his case for a max deal by dropping 22.6 points, grabbing 10.2 boards, and dishing out 9.1 assists per game since the All-Star break. Shooting guard Coby White has looked more like Kobe Bryant than Coby White, hitting contested shot after contested shot and averaging nearly 30 points per game in March. The Bulls have gone 6-2 since center Nikola Vučević from a calf injury that cost him seven games.
Still, Chicago hasn’t done a great job controlling the glass or guarding opposing playmakers, even since the Montenegrin’s return. Over their last eight games, the Bulls have still conceded the seventh-most rebounds and ninth-most assists per game, partially a byproduct of their uptempo offense and partially a byproduct of Vučević’s inconsistency on the glass. In the five games that Dončić has played alongside James but not Hachimura, he has averaged 6.2 rebounds and 8.8 assists per game, getting 17 combined assists and rebounds twice. The three games in which he failed to reach that number came against the LA Clippers (twice) and the Boston Celtics, two of the league’s best defenses and slowest-paced teams.
