When a player goes down holding his hamstring three weeks before the playoffs begin, lies on the baseline covering his face, and then flies to Madrid for stem cell treatment, there are really only two questions that matter: will he be back, and when? On Wednesday, one of the most connected voices in the sport offered the clearest answer yet, and it came with a name attached.
Speaking on ESPN’s First Take on Wednesday, Stephen A. Smith revealed that he had sat down with Lakers owner Jeanie Buss and walked away with a read that pointed firmly toward a return. When his host asked whether Luka Doncic would be back within the coming week, Smith was direct:
“I believe he will.” He was careful about what Buss had and hadn’t said. “I interviewed her the other day. She would not confirm nor deny. She said, ‘We’re not going to let out any secrets or anything.’ She said, ‘But we’re excited about the possibilities’, and left it at that.”
The language of the Lakers’ owner doing an interview and choosing the phrase “excited about the possibilities” is not the language of a franchise expecting its best player to be sidelined indefinitely.
The context makes Smith’s reading credible. The Slovenian first tweaked the hamstring late in the first half of a blowout loss to the Oklahoma City Thunder on April 2, was cleared at halftime, returned, and then went down again midway through the third quarter, lying on the baseline in visible pain before leaving for good.
The Lakers confirmed a Grade 2 left hamstring strain shortly after, ruled him out for the remainder of the regular season, and Doncic flew to Madrid for specialized stem-cell injection treatment to accelerate his recovery.
As of Wednesday, Shams Charania reported that he remains out indefinitely and is not expected to play in the first round, yet Smith’s conversation with Buss suggests the organisation’s internal outlook may be more optimistic than the official injury designation implies.
On the first-round versus second-round question, Smith offered a layered take. “I think if this series goes seven games, the first round, maybe. That’s my personal belief, but I didn’t get that confirmed from Jeanie Buss.”
The qualifier matters. Smith is distinguishing between what he extracted from the owner and what he personally believes is possible. The Lakers’ series against Houston runs through a potential Game 7 on May 3, which would put it roughly a month after Luka Doncic sustained the injury on April 2, aligning with the standard four-to-six week recovery window for Grade 2 hamstring strains. The arithmetic is narrow, but it holds.
The most instructive recent case study for what Doncic and the Lakers are navigating is Chris Paul, and it actually offers two chapters, one hopeful, one brutal, depending on which postseason you look at.
In May 2015, Paul suffered a hamstring strain during the first quarter of a do-or-die Game 7 against the San Antonio Spurs, grabbing his left hamstring while bringing the ball upcourt and heading straight to the locker room.
He willed himself back into the game and, famously, scored the game-winning layup with one second left, finishing with 27 points on 9-of-13 shooting despite limping at times and grimacing on the bench.
The sheer force of will was extraordinary. But the body presented its bill immediately: Paul missed Games 1 and 2 of the second-round series against Houston before returning for Game 3 on restricted minutes. The Clippers eventually lost in seven despite holding a 3-1 series lead.
Three years later, in the 2018 Western Conference Finals against Golden State, Paul suffered a hamstring injury late in Game 5 with Houston holding a 3-2 series lead, and this time there was no return. ESPN injury analyst Stephania Bell noted that it typically takes weeks, not days, to recover from a Grade 2 strain.
The Rockets, without Paul for Games 6 and 7, lost the series. The precedent from that 2018 playoff run is especially chilling because Paul’s own teammate, James Harden, had been diagnosed with a Grade 2 hamstring strain earlier that regular season and did not return to the lineup for approximately 3 weeks.
The Lakers are not hoping for a miracle. They are hoping that the calendar, combined with aggressive medical intervention, does what calendars and aggressive medical intervention sometimes do.
The significance of Stephen A. Smith’s exchange with Buss is less about what she said and more about what she chose not to say. An owner who believed her star was truly out indefinitely, with no realistic path back, does not describe the situation as “exciting possibilities.”
She deflects, yes, but the deflection itself has a texture. The Lakers had already gone to unusual lengths with Doncic’s treatment, with the stem cell injections in Spain representing an attempt to shave days off the recovery timeline that historical comps suggested would take closer to six weeks, and that urgency is consistent with a front office that believes the window is real.
Luka Doncic was averaging 33.5 points, 7.7 rebounds, and 8.3 assists per game this season before the injury, an MVP-caliber run that the Lakers built their playoff identity around. With the team holding a 2-0 series lead over the Rockets without him, the calculus for a potential return in a deep series has only improved.
Smith’s read, drawn from a direct conversation with the owner, is that the organization is not quietly conceding the first round or beyond without their best player.