Luka Doncic now says the blame for the hamstring injury that ended his season on April 2 belongs to him, not to JJ Redick. That is a reversal of the argument Lakers fans had all summer, and it came from the one person with the standing to settle it.
Speaking with Chris Mannix of Sports Illustrated in comments that circulated Thursday, Doncic owned the decision to stay in a game Los Angeles had already lost. “When it comes to my spirit of trying to win, I am just stubborn,” he said.
Then came the admission that actually matters. “I felt a little bit in the first half that I should have just stopped. I should have come out.” And the part that will sting in El Segundo: “I think we had a team that could compete for the championship. I definitely regret it.”
What Actually Happened on April 2
The Lakers were in Oklahoma City and trailed by 31 at halftime. Doncic tweaked his left hamstring in the second quarter, got checked by the training staff and was cleared. He went back out for the third quarter and suffered a Grade 2 strain that ended his year. Redick later said the staff discussed sitting Doncic and Austin Reaves at the break and chose to keep the starters in. Reaves played the second half too, then missed more than three weeks with an oblique injury.
Redick took the public beating for that call and he earned some of it. A 31-point halftime hole in April is not a game you chase. But Doncic is telling you he had the information and the opening to pull himself, and his competitiveness talked him out of it.
The cost was enormous. Doncic led the league in scoring at 33.5 points per game, piled up 2,143 total points, hit 254 threes and handed out 530 assists. He did all of it in 64 games, one short of the 65-game threshold the league requires for its major awards. Then Oklahoma City swept the Lakers out of the second round while he watched in street clothes.
Why It Matters for 2026-27
Doncic told fans in an August email that he was “100 percent” recovered, and he is only 27. That is the good news. The complication is that soft-tissue injuries repeat, and this is a player who already lost significant time to a calf strain in December 2024 before the trade that brought him to Los Angeles.
So the useful part of the confession is what it implies about how he handles the next blowout. If Doncic has truly decided that a lost Wednesday in March is not worth a third quarter, the Lakers get a cleaner answer to the question that defined their season. If he has not, Redick will be standing in the same spot in February with a tight hamstring and a 25-point deficit, taking the heat again.
Accepting blame is the easy half of this. Sitting down is the hard half, and that is the one Los Angeles actually needs from him.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.