Searching for the Star of the N.B.A. Finals

The narrative and its chief protagonist were harder to find in the series between the Celtics and the Mavs. Boston won in just five games, and the anticlimactic occasion was notable for its lack of true star assertion. Not that there was a lack of wonderful players. The Mavericks had made it this far in the playoffs because of the heroics of Luka Dončić, a Slovenian prodigy with the feet of a dancer and a torso like a bag of wet cement—a one-man visual anomaly whose entire life seems aimed at scoring buckets. He shoots offhanded step-back three-pointers and, after driving to the rim, throws off-kilter sidearm passes to his teammates on the perimeter. He never appears to be moving quickly and yet he always finds, or creates, an opening for a decent shot. He is usually deadly in the clutch, and one of the great shames of his first Finals performance was that his team was almost never close enough to victory to give him the chance to show off this flair for late-game dramatics. In the tightest contest, Game Three, Dončić’s penchant for sloppy defense got him booted, after a sixth foul, with more than four minutes still to play.