With his regular season probably over due to injury, we want to examine Luka Dončić and the game where he scored 60 points recently. We did this a few years ago when Stephen Curry put up a 60-spot effort himself, and today on NBA Tuesday, we will compare the efforts of these two superstars. On March 19 against the Miami Heat on the road, the Los Angeles Lakers point guard torched the opponent for 60 points on just 30 shots from the floor, an absurd level of efficiency, even more so than Curry achieved.

Let’s look at the two games next to each other, the Golden State Warriors shooting guard’s effort coming on February 3, 2024:

  • Curry: 22-for-38 from the floor, 10-of-23 from three-point range, and 6-for-6 from the line.
  • Dončić: 18-for-30 from the floor, 9-for-17 from three-point range, and 15-for-19 from the line.

If the Slovenian revelation—also known by the following nicknames, too: The Matador, El Matador, Cool Hand, The Don, Wonder Boy, El Niño Maravilla, Swaggy L, Luka Legend, Too Easy, Luka Magic—had made a few more free throws, it really would have added some luster to this achievement. At 6-foot-8 and 230 pounds, he is not the prototypical NBA point guard, but Dončić sure can shoot. And while Curry added four assists in his team’s losing effort in Atlanta, Luka tossed in three dimes here.

But that is nothing to focus on: both players lit the basket on fire, both from two-point and three-point ranges. The efficiency there is stunning, especially for Dončić in terms of field-goal percentage and his ability to get to the line on shooting fouls committed by defenders who had no ability to stop him. Both players present matchup nightmares for opposing teams, of course, and both players are excellent shooters, too. These two isolated games illustrate those facts to extreme levels, obviously. But let’s go deeper.

Dončić’s game score was 51.4, which is computed by … oh, forget it. Just read about it here, as it is basically a streamlined version of Player Efficiency Rating (PER) for singular games, instead of for a whole season. Curry’s score was 45.5 on his big night in February 2024. When we look at both players and their career PER rankings—Luka is 10th all time, currently, while Curry is 28th right now, as he’s aged a bit and slowed down somewhat—we see the usual suspects, with a few surprises here and there. So be it.

We all know El Matador is only in his age-26 season, though (he just turned 27 on February 28, but he started the season at age 26). He is already an eight-year NBA veteran, and in this season, he is leading the league in shot attempts per game, shots made per game, three-point attempts per game, three pointers made per game, free-throw attempts, and scoring average. Dončić is entering his prime, really, and he hasn’t played in more than 72 games during his entire time in the NBA, the high coming early.

He definitely needs to continue working on his conditioning as he gets older, and he has a grizzled teammate to show him the way.