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While we won’t know whether Dallas Mavericks star rookie Luka Doncic made the All-Star Game until Thursday, Shams Charania of The Athletic and Stadium revealed on Friday that the 19-year-old will take part in the 2019 All-Star Skills Challenge.
Chris Haynes of Yahoo Sports revealed that Sacramento Kings point guard De’Aaron Fox will be there as well.
The Skills Challenge will be held on Saturday, February 16, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Players are asked to run through a basketball obstacle course of sorts to test their ball-handling, passing and shooting skills. It is an eight-player knockout-style tournament, which Brooklyn Nets guard Spencer Dinwiddie won last year.
Doncic looks like a natural fit for the competition given his versatile skill set. He’s one of the smoothest ball-handlers and passers in the game and is hitting 35.6 percent of his threes despite a recent 5-of-27 slump from beyond the arc.
Regardless of the other Skills Challenge participants, chances are Doncic will emerge as one of the clear favorites, if not the leader of the pack.
Fox should be right up there with him thanks to his blinding speed, which should be helpful as he runs from station to station and through the ball-handling slalom.
The next question is whether Doncic will be the first rookie named to the NBA All-Star Game since Blake Griffin in 2011. He finished fifth among Western Conference frontcourt players in the final All-Star voting results, and his peers notably thought highly of him as well with an eighth-place mark. NBA coaches are the sole arbiters of the All-Star reserve pool, however, with the 10 starters having already been chosen.
The reserves will be revealed Thursday during TNT’s NBA Tip-Off, which begins at 7 p.m. ET.
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