Kevon Looney has spent 11 years in the NBA with three championships, with stops with the Warriors and Pelicans. He’d never had a teammate fly the entire roster to his home country before Luka Doncic did it this offseason. And now, he’s spoken about how that has impacted the whole 17-player team in a big way.
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Looney signed with the Lakers in July on a one-year, $3.9 million deal after a decade in Golden State and a season in New Orleans. Speaking on Mason & Ireland’s podcast, he broke down what the trip to Slovenia revealed about his new teammate.
“I’ve been in the league for a while, and that was my first time doing something like that, going to somebody’s country and bringing us all out there and spending that much time together. I never did that before,” Looney said, according to a recent X post.
Looney tied the gesture directly to Doncic’s standing with the group.
“So that just shows his character, showing that he really wants to win,” he further added, according to PurpGold’s X post. “He wants people to know his background, why he is how he is, he did a good job of that. He’s a great player and a great leader, and we got to see his personality off the court. So it was great, and we going to follow him, run through walls for him.”
Looney has three rings from his time with Golden State in 2017, 2018, and 2022, the last of those as the team’s starting center. He spent years alongside Steph Curry and Draymond Green in that locker room, so his read on what makes a leader isn’t coming from nowhere.
Doncic grew up in Ljubljana before leaving for Real Madrid’s youth academy at 13, and he’s represented Slovenia internationally for years, including leading the national team to their first-ever EuroBasket title in 2017 as a teenager.
Bringing his new Lakers teammates there wasn’t just a vacation, it put them in the middle of the basketball culture that shaped him before he ever set foot in the NBA.
The Lakers have 18 players on the roster right now. Take Doncic out of that number, and every one of his 17 teammates was on that trip Looney’s describing.
Not many teams fly the whole roster out to a teammate’s home country just to see where he’s from. It’s the kind of gesture that says more about a locker room’s direction than a single quote usually can, especially with training camp and a new season on the horizon.