Bill Walton invented the basketball style that Luka Doncic plays so well.
NBA Hall of Fame center Bill Walton, who died of colon cancer last month, was the best player in the world at his peak. As described in David Halberstam’s book The Breaks of the Game, a merely somewhat healthy Walton led the Portland Trail Blazers to an NBA championship in 1977, defeating fellow former all-everything UCLA center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar‘s Los Angeles Lakers and then a loaded Philadelphia 76ers squad along the way. Walton’s dominance in college and his brief but brilliant professional peak showcased a revolutionary style of play that was ahead of its time. Blazers coach Jack Ramsay, reflecting on how Walton had helped neutralize future Hall of Famers Julius Erving and Doug Collins, heaped superlatives upon his singular star: “I’ve never coached a better player. I’ve never coached a better competitor. And I’ve never coached a better person than Bill Walton.”
Walton was a unique center, particularly during his short prime in the late 1970s, when the league still lacked a three-point line and centers played very close to the basket. In a period when centers were considered to be scorers first and everything else second, Walton scrambled the formula. Unlike prior behemoths who banged in the low post and scored easy buckets, he functioned as a passing hub for the team offense, a role that centers were not traditionally known for, as well as a mobile stopper and top-tier shot blocker on defense. This led to one of the most underdog triumphs of all time for the Trail Blazers, who consisted primarily of scrappy role players outside of Walton and leading scorer Maurice Lucas.
Remembering Walton’s influence is not just a historical or obituarial matter. Because while Walton was singular in his time, his style is not singular anymore. The game of basketball — played these days with such grace by the likes of Mavericks forward Luka Doncic, who dominated the Western Conference finals this year en route to the NBA Finals, and Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, the reigning MVP who was once compared by Walton to Martin Luther King Jr. — is still played in Walton’s free-flowing, share-the-ball, all-players-can-play-all-positions hippie style. This is the way all the modern greats — Doncic and Jokic over the past half-decade, LeBron James for most of the previous two — play the game.
It’s a style that the 6-foot-11-inch Walton, due to three dozen orthopedic surgeries, only really came close to perfecting early in his career, at UCLA, where he was a two-time college champ on a team so talented he was backed up by a center (Swen Nater) who would go on to a solid career as an NBA starter, and then that one MVP season in Portland, where he gave the world a preview of Jokic three decades in advance. Before he hung up his high-tops for good, he put his team-first chops to work orchestrating the Boston Celtics’ bench offense during their 1985-86 title run, for which he won the league’s Sixth Man of the Year award.
Walton’s impact on basketball extends far beyond his own playing career. Born in La Mesa, California, in 1952, Walton grew up with a deep love for the game. He played at UCLA under legendary coach John Wooden during that program’s peak, leading the Bruins to two national championships and an 88-game winning streak. His college career was marked by performances that were otherworldly in terms of their offensive efficiency, including the 1973 national championship game against Memphis State when he scored 44 points on 21-of-22 shooting.
And despite his injury-plagued professional career, Walton’s influence is evident everywhere in the best of the modern NBA. The evolution of the center position is a testament to his lasting impact on the game. Centers today are dominant not just in the paint but are also orchestrators of the offense and nimble, mobile strategists on defense. Nikola Jokic, whose Nuggets claimed last year’s NBA championship, exemplifies this evolution. Born in Serbia, Jokic entered the NBA in 2015 and quickly established himself as one of the most versatile big men in the league. His ability to score, rebound, and, most impressively, pass has drawn comparisons to Walton’s style of play. Walton saw Jokic as more than a basketball player, and his praise for Jokic highlights how the Serbian center embodies the unselfish, imaginative, and visionary style of play that Walton had attempted to implement.
Luka Doncic’s dominance in the Western Conference finals this year en route to the NBA championship is also a testament to the enduring influence of Walton’s “play the game, not the positions” style, a reflection of Walton’s basketball philosophy, which has long predominated in the EuroLeague where many of them cut their teeth. Hailing from Slovenia, Doncic was a game-orchestrating prodigy from a young age, outplaying grown men in Europe as a callow teenager before joining the NBA. The gigantic 6-foot-7 guard’s ability to control the game, create opportunities for his teammates, and perform under pressure has made him one of the league’s brightest stars. If Jokic is a center who plays like a point guard, Doncic is a point guard who plays like a center.
The NBA season chronicled in The Breaks of the Game may have been a fleeting and largely forgotten blip in the league’s pre-Michael Jordan history, but the success of multipurpose players like Doncic and Jokic proves that Walton’s vision is now a reality. The modern game they have created, with its emphasis on playmaking, positional versatility, and unselfishness, is an evolved form of the beautiful basketball that Walton briefly demonstrated to the world. The big man walked on broken, unsteady feet so that today’s stars could run.