The question that hovered over Luka Doncic’s summer for three months now has an official answer. The Slovenian Basketball Federation has announced its 19-man preliminary roster for the late-August window of the 2027 FIBA World Cup European Qualifiers, and neither Doncic nor fellow Laker Jaxson Hayes is on it.
The announcement lands 10 days before the Lakers arrive in Doncic’s home country for a very different kind of basketball gathering. Doncic is hosting the entire roster in Ljubljana for a four-day minicamp from Aug. 20 to Aug. 24, and the federation’s roster now confirms that when the minicamp ends, Doncic’s competitive summer ends with it.
Why Luka Doncic is not playing for Slovenia this summer
The decision itself is not new, and that matters for understanding what Sunday’s announcement actually was. Doncic said in May that he would sit out this summer’s qualifying windows, and he has been consistent about the reason ever since, telling reporters in June that family comes first.
The main reason is my daughters,” said Doncic. “The most important thing for me is being at home with my daughters. Right now, that’s what matters most.”
The 27-year-old has spent the offseason in Slovenia to be near his daughters, Gabriela and Olivia, amid an ongoing custody situation that he has asked to handle privately. Slovenia had already left him off a preliminary roster in June for the July window, so his absence from the August list was expected on all sides.
What changed Sunday is that the last sliver of uncertainty disappeared, because the federation’s official squad closed the door that his father, Sasa Doncic, had publicly tried to keep open in May by suggesting an August return remained possible.
For a player who led Slovenia to the EuroBasket quarterfinals last September and has carried the national program since his teens, a full summer away from the jersey is genuinely rare. It is also, from the Lakers’ perspective, exactly the summer they would have designed for him.
Jaxson Hayes’ Slovenia debut stays on hold
The second name missing from the roster is the more surprising one to casual observers, because Hayes has spent the past 10 months working toward wearing it. The Lakers backup center said in October that he was pursuing a Slovenian passport specifically to play alongside Doncic, and by April the paperwork was done.
“Yeah, it really came through,” Hayes said in April when asked whether his Slovenian citizenship was finalized.
A finalized passport made Hayes eligible in principle, but eligibility and selection are different things, and head coach Aleksander Sekulic’s August squad does not include him. Hayes’ potential Slovenia debut will now have to wait for a future window.
The practical reading is straightforward: With Doncic sitting out, the partnership that motivated the entire citizenship pursuit is not available this summer, and Hayes will be in Ljubljana in late August anyway — wearing Lakers gear at the minicamp rather than a national team uniform.
What Slovenia’s roster looks like without its two Lakers
Sekulic’s 19-man preliminary squad leans on the program’s established core, headlined by veterans Klemen Prepelic, Alen Omic and Vlatko Cancar. The most interesting inclusion is 17-year-old Baskonia guard Stefan Joksimovic, who led Slovenia to its first U18 EuroBasket title this summer and was named tournament MVP after averaging 23.1 points, 6.7 rebounds and 3.7 assists per game.
The stakes of the window are real. Slovenia will play preparation games against Latvia and Montenegro before visiting France in Paris on Aug. 27 and hosting Hungary in Ljubljana on Aug. 30, per the qualifying schedule.
Slovenia sits at 3-3 through six qualifying games, and the July window showed how much the roster misses its superstar: Without Doncic, Slovenia lost by 31 points at Estonia and then dropped its home game against Sweden. A trip to Paris to face France is about as unforgiving a next assignment as the group could offer.
None of that appears to have changed the calculus for Doncic, and there is a longer arc worth remembering here. Doncic said in February, days after the All-Star Game in Los Angeles, that leading Slovenia to the 2028 Olympics — in his adopted home city — remains a defining goal. This summer is a pause in his national team story, not an ending, and the same is true for Hayes, whose passport does not expire with one omitted roster.
What the roster news means for the Lakers
For the Lakers, the federation’s announcement is quietly one of the better pieces of news of the month, because it formalizes an August with exactly one basketball obligation on Doncic’s calendar — his own.
The minicamp is the centerpiece of a summer in which Doncic has stepped fully into the leadership role the roster now demands. With LeBron James in Philadelphia and the front office having remade the rotation around new arrivals, the four days in Ljubljana are the first real chance for this group to become a team, and 16 of 17 players committed, with rookie Cameron Carr excused only because the NBA’s rookie orientation is mandatory.
Now the schedule after those four days is just as valuable as the days themselves. Had Doncic played the qualifying window, he would have gone from hosting his teammates straight into a competitive game in Paris three days later, with a second game in Ljubljana three days after that.
Instead, the stretch between the minicamp and training camp belongs entirely to rest and preparation. Doncic averaged 33.5 points, 8.3 assists and 7.7 rebounds per game last season before the hamstring strain that ended his year in April, and he has since declared himself fully healthy. A first training camp as the Lakers’ unquestioned centerpiece, entered fully rested and fully healthy, is the version of September this franchise has been planning for since February of 2025.
There is a version of this story where the Lakers spend late August watching their franchise player absorb contact in Paris while their backup center makes an emotional national team debut beside him. The version Slovenia’s federation confirmed Sunday is quieter, and from a purely Lakers-facing point of view, better: both players come home from Ljubljana with nothing on the schedule but the season.
