He wasn’t fat at all for most of 2023-2024. Once the knee injuries piled up you saw the weight start to gain around feb/march.

2 of the best players in the league for the past 5+ years have been “fat” and “unathletic” white guys. It’s always been funny to me

The narrative has gotten so bad people believe Luka was fat during his 34/9/10 season. He came into the ²³⁄₂₄ season in great shape after hiring a personal training team. It’s why he started the season super strong, it wasn’t until february after he had carried the Mavs during December and January (37/9/11 averages) with Lively, Kyrie, Josh Green, Maxi all at one point out or at the same time that he injured his knee and it kept bleeding. Seemingly people only remember the finals. But to start the ²³⁄₂₄ season until early February Luka was in good shape lol. You telling me you can watch that Christmas game vs the Suns and tell me with a serious face he was a “fat ass” lmfao. People have lost their mind

Yeah like ideally Luka would be in perfect shape- but it doesn’t really seem like it affects him much otherwise. His defensive woes have always been an attitude/effort thing (he actually tries to play good defense in the playoffs) and when he actually gets back on D instead of yelling at the refs.

Even chubby Luka is still probably the best or 2nd best offensive talent in basketball.

Or the ultimate example….
Shaq.

The thing with Luka is he does this every single year. Always shows up super slim then finishes the year looking like he took one too many cookies from the cookie jar

He’s not gonna average better numbers, because he’s slim, imo.

He’ll just actually be available at the end of the season, and have lesss injury issues.

So he will aggregate MORE numbers, but not BETTER numbers, i think.

The issue isn’t what he can do fat or skinny, it’s whether he can stay healthy. Being overweight is definitely a factor in his lower body injuries. Lakers fans aren’t going to care that he can put up 30/9/7 against the Wizards in January, they want him healthy for the postseason.

Zion even when “fat” was actually mega jacked, if Luka looked like that people would bust

We’re talking about “in shape” by the standards of an elite, world-class athlete, not the average guy. Luka was overweight (by NBA standards) and missed many games. That is not in shape.

Obviously Luka was always in shape, but that’s not the standard for someone who is paid tens of millions to play a sport.

Also beer and booze are liquid calories, and the good stuff goes down easy

Exercising doesn’t burn as much as people think it burn either.

you’re rich as fuck and can get anything at any time

Exactly, which is why literally the opposite conclusion is more accurate. Fast food and junk food is tasty, cheap, convenient to buy etc. Tasty healthy food takes time to prepare and costs more, that’s why they have personal chefs to make the best food for them. If you were rich, you think you’d still be eating McDonald’s and Doritos all the time? Hell no, you’d just make your personal chefs cook a healthier, tastier version of them.

Dude loves video games and beer too. So I imagine a lot of down time is spent sitting.

Then you got the fact that he needs a lot of food to have the energy to work out and play. It’s really easy to go overboard on shitty food when you’re consuming so much to meet those energy needs.

When I played in high school they would give us the afternoon off on game days since we only had 2 other classes after lunch and one of those was our gym/sport class.

A bunch of us would go out to eat and load up on carbs before the game. We’d go to the local pizza spot or the buffet and pig out and then just go to someone’s house and rest before game time.

I can’t even imagine how much someone that big who plays professionally has to eat for energy. Hell I’m 170 now in my 40s and my 2 meals a day are huge in order to meet my needs to maintain and attempt to build muscle. I can’t even eat enough protein I have to drink 2 scoops of protein as well to hit my goals.

If your entire job is being an athlete and you’re paid hundreds of millions for it, but you can’t exercise any restraint or discipline, that’s really on the person and they should reflect on their commitment.

And yet despite all this, there are almost no fat NBA players

Beer

It’s the beer. Not food

It actually is very much baffling considering that there was an article on Boris Diaw and the amount of food he had to eat to stay fat everyday. Its like 7,000 calories if you are 6’8 or 6’9 

Yeah we take it for granted that pro athletes being in shape, it requires discipline to do that. Also I really wonder what would happen to Luka when he retires. Hope he won’t turn obese.

More calories ou than in = Weight loss. I ran, ate less crap and lost 50 pounds.

11 year old account, 5 comments, -36 karma haha

⁸⁰⁄₂₀ is generous. ⁹⁰⁄₁₀ or more for just the weight loss. The cardio and weight training is massively important for function though so you should still do it. My mentor is an obesity doctor and she says diet is 100% of the weight loss, exercise is 100% of the happiness. Talks a lot about people using the incretin mimetic drugs like the ozempics and similar, dropping the weight and then feeling massively drained and even bloated and how much of that is loss in muscle mass and bone density from not exercising enough. Then now having already dropped the weight, an energy source, it’s actually much harder than before to gain functional health back. I imagine going that far is hard for an athlete but for regular people she says she sees it all the time now sadly.

yeah but we’re not even talking about weight loss or even weight maintenance; luka goes into the season in shape then gains weight during a season of cardio-intensive exercise, which is crazy he’s actively eating a fuckton consistently every day

Okay but who tf is upvoting this. No disrespect 10k calories in a day is insane!!! You’d literally eat 8 large Big Mac meals. Pro athletes shouldn’t be fat. That’s just it

People here don’t watch the sport or follow the players. They let guys like Cowherd tell them Luka was fat even though he started getting slimmer the last two years at Dallas.

You have to realize none of these people watch basketball and love ignoring any context

The supporting cast was a joke compared to the contenders as well. They had a lot of games where they had Hayes, Ayton, Laravia, Bronny, Kleber and guys like that play 10-20+ minutes. Even at their best, the roster had an awful big rotation, awful depth, awful defense.

Right now I think they fixed the depth a little bit, the starting big on paper should be great (backup is even more questionable right now) but the 2 way defensive minded players are still missing and they don’t have a 4.

People talk about him like he’s Zion. The guy has made the conference finals and finals the same amount of times as Jokic/SGA/Giannis. The only thing he is missing is an mvp(shoulda won in 24), and a championship ring(played a way better team in finals than those other guys).

His injury in April was just a result of him being overworked for a month. They played a fuck ton of games in March, Luka & Austin were both top 5 in MPG, despite the crazy run they were on in march the games were still close so he had to play far more than his peers. With Luka’s usage rate and scoring burden it was eventually too much

Cowherd is actually a very entertaining speaker. He just says things that some of you disagree with and then you think he’s an idiot.

It’s not even the first time he shows up like this. This stuff isn’t newsworthy even in Slovenia.

Seriously. Did everyone forget Luka came into last season and was very in shape?

Hurt on company time, recover on company time

It’s crazy to think what Shaq could have been if he had a work ethic. An in-shape Shaq who shot an even passable rate from the line for his career might be the GOAT. And he is already one of the greatest players ever.

lol lmao. Imagine calling fucking Cowherd an authority figure. Authority of what? Awful basketball takes?

He got injured from the massive over use and workload in march and bc he was slim last season, this guy confuses the correlation. If he was not slim, he’d most likely have gotten injured faster