Doncic-Reaves Rank Second Among NBA Duos, Behind Jokic-Murray

A Game Score and box-score breakdown shows Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves trail only Denver's Jokic-Murray pairing in combined production, while lagging in games played together.

Published: September 4, 2026 · Figures as of September 4, 2026

Asked: Is the Luka/Austin Reaves duo the best in the league?

No — Doncic-Reaves are the league's clear second duo, behind Denver's Jokic-Murray

Judged on last season's box-score value (2025-26, the Lakers' most recent completed season), Luka Doncic and Austin Reaves combined for a higher scoring rate and Game Score than every actual returning duo in the league except Nikola Jokic and Jamal Murray — who still lead by a real margin (49.3 combined Game Score to 44.9) and, importantly, actually played nearly 50% more games together.

The production case

Doncic averaged 33.5 points on 64 games played and Reaves 23.3 on 51, a combined 56.8 points per game between them — the highest of any pairing that has actually played together. (Philadelphia's Jaylen Brown/Tyrese Maxey nominally edge them at 57.0, but that's not a real duo yet: Brown played all 82 games for Boston last season and has only been filed to Philadelphia since the offseason, with zero games as teammates on record.)

Ranking every current pairing of a team's top two scorers by combined Game Score — Hollinger's composite covering scoring, efficiency, rebounding, assists, steals, blocks, turnovers and fouls — the top of the league looks like this:

Doncic and Reaves also shot a combined 62.5% true shooting, third among these groups behind Oklahoma City (66.1%) and Denver (64.4%). Defensively, the picture is mixed: their combined 2.74 steals per game trails only Philadelphia's still-untested pair, and their 11.15 combined defensive rebounds a game is second behind Denver — largely because Doncic himself boards at 7.1 a game, well above a typical guard. But their 0.92 combined blocks a game is unremarkable next to Oklahoma City's rim-protecting pair (2.66, most of it Chet Holmgren) or Denver's Jokic alone (0.82).

The caveat that actually separates them from Denver

Despite those per-game numbers, Doncic and Reaves shared the floor in only 41 of the Lakers' 82 games last season — exactly half the schedule. Reaves was out for a 19-game stretch from December 28 to February 1 plus two shorter absences, and Doncic had three separate absences of his own (3, 4, and 5 games). By contrast, Jokic and Murray played 63 games together and SGA and Holmgren played 60. So the gap in Game Score understates the gap in reliability: Denver's numbers rest on a much larger, more continuous sample of the two players actually being on the court together.

What the house models add

Neither player's role was in flux last season — Doncic's performance-shift reading of 0.29 and Reaves' 0.23 both sit below the league's median (0.37), with Reaves near the bottom decile, meaning both had settled, stable deployments rather than shifting ones. Doncic's sustainability score of 0.82 (above the 0.7 threshold) says his big scoring window was backed by real shot-volume and efficiency, not variance — though the model does lean toward a modest pullback (-1.0 point per game) off his hot 182-day stretch, a lean rather than a certainty given the model explains only a minority of forward variance. Reaves' sustainability score of 0.70 flagged his efficiency running slightly below his own baseline, with the model reading that as room to recover rather than decline, and its own scoring lean is essentially flat (-0.6 ppg).

Bottom line: on everything measurable here, this is a top-two duo in the league, not the outright best one — Denver's pairing is ahead on both scoring value and reliability. Confidence is medium-high on the ranking itself, since it's built from complete box-score data; it's lower on any "best duo" claim beyond that, because none of this measures on-court chemistry or two-man lineup net rating, which isn't something this data captures.