EuroBasket is firmly underway as several of the NBA’s biggest stars vie for one of the most coveted international championships. Los Angeles Lakers superstar Luka Doncic is representing Slovenia, and is off to a remarkable start despite his team being just 1-2 in group play thus far.

Perhaps the most talked-about moment of the tournament so far, though, was not a highlight or a big win. Instead, it was a controversial end-of-game sequence involving Doncic in Slovenia’s loss to France.

With the clock ticking down and France up by an insurmountable margin, guard Sylvain Francisco started to dribble the ball out, as is customary.

With about 10 seconds left, Luka went to shake his hand, and he accepted, signaling the end of the game.

But once Slovenia’s players all started to walk off the court, Francisco charged towards the basket and scored a last second layup, leading to an upset Doncic and Slovenia instigating an on-court tiff with France:

WYD, France? pic.twitter.com/TgrxFAOY6H

— Lakers Nation (@LakersNation) August 30, 2025

The moment quickly made the rounds on social media, and Doncic spoke to the Slovenian media about his perspective on the issue, via BasketNews:

“At the end we shook hands. The point difference can be important, but we shook hands. I didn’t think he’d go and score again,” Doncic explained to Slovenian media after the game.

It’s a tricky situation where neither player is necessarily in the wrong, as point differential is a major tiebreaker in EuroBasket group play. But Francisco offered an apology to Doncic, as well as an explanation:

“I said I was sorry,” Francisco told reporters. “I actually went to shake hands and go to the layup like I said to Luka. The only thing that I really regret is just shaking hands — I should have told him, ‘Nah, play defense,’ because I was going for a tie.

“You know, we’ve got point differential, which is really important in EuroBasket, and that’s why it just clicked in my head,” he added. “At the end of the day, I would never do that, but I take full responsibility for it, and I just gotta move forward.”

It’s understandable why the French player would want to score again to help with point differential. But as he says, he likely shouldn’t have accepted the handshake if his plan was to go score again. To Luka’s point, the handshake usually signals the end of the game.

But moments like this show just how passionate Doncic and other NBA stars are about representing their country in international competition. And seeing Luka rack up records for Slovenia has been incredible to watch.

Luka Doncic reaches historic milestones

Luka Doncic has been one of the best overall players so far at EuroBasket.

He scored 34 and 39 points in Slovenia’s first two games of the group stages, respectively, but both were losses.

In Slovenia’s first win of the tournament on Sunday, however, Doncic made history in multiple ways.

His first piece of history involved finishing with 26 points, 10 rebounds and 11 assists, a triple-double. This statline is nothing out of the ordinary for Doncic in the NBA, but at FIBA EuroBasket, that type of production is almost unheard of. In fact, he’s just the fifth player in EuroBasket history to do so.

He joins Stoijko Vrankovic (1993), Toni Kukoc (1995), Rares Mandache (2013) and Mateusz Ponitka (2022) as the only players to have at least 10 points, 10 rebounds and 10 assists in EuroBasket competition.

Doncic also reached 400 career points at EuroBasket, putting him on rare pace and on a short list of Slovenians in the tournament’s history.

Doncic joins Goran Dragic and Jaka Lakovic as the only Slovenia to reach that milestone and at age 26, Luka became the youngest player overall since Tony Parker to do so.