Luka Doncic scored a season-high 53 points Friday night, carrying the Los Angeles Lakers past the Portland Trail Blazers 124-118 at Crypto.com Arena. It was his fourth straight 40-point game, and it pushed his scoring average to 40.1 points through nine games, a pace only Wilt Chamberlain has ever exceeded.
How to watch: Los Angeles Lakers vs Portland Trail Blazers, Friday, November 6, 2026 at Crypto.com Arena, Los Angeles
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Doncic Outscores Portland Alone In The Third Quarter
For a half, the game belonged to Portland. The Lakers missed their first 15 three-point attempts, trailed by 16 in the second quarter, and needed a Doncic heave from beyond half court at the halftime buzzer to keep the night from slipping away. The third quarter flipped everything. Los Angeles scored 17 consecutive points, and Doncic outscored the Trail Blazers 20-15 in the quarter by himself, part of a 32-11 run that built a 16-point Lakers lead early in the fourth.
Portland kept coming, cutting the margin to four points repeatedly in the closing minutes, but Doncic answered with a jumper in the lane with 28 seconds left, and he and Austin Reaves combined for 10 points in the final seconds to close it out. The full line shows how heavy the load was: 53 points on 17 of 33 shooting, with five three-pointers, 14 of 18 free throws, five rebounds and five assists in 38 minutes. Reaves added 25 points and Walker Kessler had 16 points and 12 rebounds for Los Angeles. Deni Avdija finished with 22 points, 11 assists and nine rebounds for Portland, and Damian Lillard scored 22. The win was the Lakers’ fourth straight, moved them to 8-2, avenged a 136-129 home loss to Portland on October 27, and gave Los Angeles its first NBA Cup win of the season.
Only Chamberlain Has Started A Season Hotter
The nine-game totals are where this run leaves normal early-season form behind. Doncic has scored 361 points through his first nine games, and Chamberlain is the only player in NBA history with more at the same point of a season, with 472 through nine games in 1962-63 and 455 in 1961-62, according to ESPN Research. Measured by average, Doncic’s 40.1 sits third on that nine-game list, behind only Chamberlain’s starts of 52.4 and 50.6 points per game in those two seasons, according to the Lakers.
No player has averaged 40 points across a full season since Chamberlain in 1962-63. Chamberlain averaged a record 50.4 in 1961-62 and 44.8 the following year. The best marks since are Michael Jordan’s 37.1 in 1986-87, the highest of the three-point era, and James Harden’s 36.1 in 2018-19, the most prolific scoring season of this century. Doncic’s own career high for a season is 33.9, set with Dallas in 2023-24, which puts the size of the jump in plain terms. He is not chasing a hot streak record. He is chasing the one scoring line in league history that has stood alone for more than 60 years.
Doncic kept the framing modest afterward. “It’s obviously a long season,” he said. “We’re 10 games in. We’ve got 72 left. As long as we’re winning, I’m good.”
A Streak That Runs Through Lakers History
The franchise context is just as rare. Doncic joined Elgin Baylor, Kobe Bryant and George Mikan as the only Lakers to score 40 points in four straight regular-season games, and theScore noted he is the first Laker to reach 40 in four straight since Bryant in 2012. The same night, he passed Mikan for the fifth-most 40-point games in Lakers history, a mark he reached in just 101 regular-season games with Los Angeles.
Friday was his 11th career 50-point game, tying him for 10th place on the all-time list, and his second 50-point game of this young season. It was also his sixth 40-point game of the campaign, all of them inside a seven-game surge that includes a 37-point performance as the low night. Across those seven games he has posted at least 35 points, five rebounds, five assists and five three-pointers every time, a combination no defence in the league has found an answer for yet.
“Luka can do some things that maybe a handful, if not no one, can do in basketball,” Lakers coach JJ Redick said. Portland coach Micah Nori was just as direct before the game, calling Doncic “the MVP right now. Hands down.”
The Lakers, owners of the league’s top-rated offense through 10 games, now take the show on the road, visiting Detroit on Sunday, November 8, and Atlanta on November 9. The 40-point pace will cool at some point; 72 games is a long way to hold any line, let alone this one. But nine games in, the comparison set for what Luka Doncic is doing contains exactly one other name, and it is the name attached to every scoring record the NBA has.
