Luka Doncic was turning heads long before he became one of the NBA’s biggest superstars, and former NBA guard Evan Turner still remembers his first encounter with the Slovenian.
Back in 2015, a 16-year-old Doncic was playing for Real Madrid when the Spanish club faced the Boston Celtics in an NBA preseason exhibition game.
Turner, who was with Boston at the time, recalled how head coach Brad Stevens had warned the team about Madrid’s teenage prospect.
“I remember at the end of the game, Brad (Stevens) was like, ‘Yo, there’s a 16-year-old coming in. That kid is pretty good. He’s kind of a big guard,'” Turner told Sports Illustrated’s Chris Mannix on the Open Floor podcast. “We were kind of fed up with the whole… Euro conversation. Milan was saying they’re going to beat us and we beat them by 40. We’re like, ‘Bro, we don’t like to hear any more hype train on anybody.'”
Boston eventually defeated Real Madrid 111-96, with Doncic making a brief appearance late in the contest.
Despite failing to score, the teenager’s movement and ability to control the pace of the game immediately caught Turner’s attention.
“We saw Luka at the end of the game. Avery picked him up, or maybe it was Terry Rozier, maybe even Marcus Smart,” Turner recalled. “One thing I noticed… when you play with a pace or herky-jerky, you can comprehend how to guard somebody. When I first see him, I see how he’s messing people up because his pace is at a crazy level. I’m like, ‘How the hell did he learn how to do this?’ He’ll walk up on you, switch his hip, goes this way, goes that way.”
Turner actually missed the game with a right knee strain, but watching Doncic from the sidelines was enough to recognize something special.
Doncic later revealed that he played only four or five minutes in the exhibition.
The Lakers superstar has since credited Europe’s development system for helping shape his basketball IQ, explaining on the Mind the Game podcast in 2025 how young players were taught fundamentals and decision-making rather than simply competing in tournaments.
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