The Los Angeles Lakers’ first training camp of the post-LeBron James era will unofficially begin about 6,200 miles from El Segundo. Luka Doncic plans to bring every player on the roster to his home country of Slovenia in August for a four-day camp built around on-court work, rounds of golf and time spent around Ljubljana before the real thing opens in the fall.
Luka Doncic is hosting the entire Los Angeles Lakers roster in Slovenia for a four-day minicamp in August, a source close to the Lakers told ESPN. The itinerary will include workouts, golf and some Ljubljana tourism and bonding ahead of training camp.
— Dave McMenamin (@mcten) July 29, 2026
Dan Woike of The Athletic confirmed the report and added the two details that make it more than a photo opportunity: Doncic is covering the costs for his teammates to make the trip, and the invitation extends beyond the standard roster to the team’s two-way players. Those details matter, because they turn a nice gesture into a statement about who this team belongs to now.
Luka Dončić will be hosting a players minicamp in Slovenia this summer, fitting the bill for his teammates to travel to Europe to get a jump on the 2026-27 season, sources tell @TheAthletic. The entire roster and two-way players have been invited. @mcten was first
— Dan Woike (@DanWoikeSports) July 29, 2026
The camp is coming to Luka this time
The Lakers already held a smaller minicamp in Las Vegas during Summer League earlier this month. Doncic was not there as the star guard has spent the offseason back home in Slovenia with his daughters, which meant the first player-led gathering of the summer happened without the player the whole operation is being built around.
That context is what makes the August plan so telling. When James led this franchise, the preseason ritual ran in the opposite direction, with players convening in Las Vegas for the minicamps he hosted ahead of training camp. Those sessions carried real weight in the organization, and a young Austin Reaves first turned heads at one of them on his way to earning his place with the team.
Doncic is not replicating that tradition so much as inverting it. Rather than flying to where the team gathers, the team is flying to where he lives, and he is the one picking up the tab. For a franchise that spent eight years organized around James’ habits, schedule and preferences, the geography of this trip is the clearest evidence yet of where the center of gravity has moved.
One note of caution on a widely repeated detail: Woike’s post says Doncic is “fitting the bill” for the travel, phrasing that reads as a typo for footing the bill. The meaning is hard to mistake in context, but the wording is his, not a direct financial disclosure from the team.
What four days actually buys a remade roster
The basketball case for the trip is straightforward, because almost nobody on this roster has played meaningful minutes together. Rob Pelinka’s offseason produced the Walker Kessler sign-and-trade that hard-capped the Lakers at the first apron, the re-signing of Reaves and a wave of depth additions that included Quentin Grimes, Collin Sexton, Sandro Mamukelashvili, Ziaire Williams, Kevon Looney and Matisse Thybulle.
That is more than half a roster’s worth of new relationships for Doncic to build before JJ Redick installs anything in September. Some of that work is already happening verbally.
Looney, who spent a decade screening for Stephen Curry in Golden State, has been openly studying how his new star likes to operate, telling Fadeaway World that “Luka is a pick-and-roll master” while explaining how he plans to adapt his screening angles to free up both Doncic and Reaves. Four unstructured days in Ljubljana are exactly the setting where those conversations become habits.
The urgency behind it traces back to how last season ended. Los Angeles went out against Oklahoma City in a postseason shadowed by Doncic’s hamstring trouble, and the front office responded by reshaping the roster rather than running it back. Doncic, for his part, has sounded like a player who believes the reshuffle worked.
“I think we have a really good team,” he said in a Golf Channel interview with Rich Lerner earlier this month, adding that the way last season closed has the group eager for the new one.
The roster in Ljubljana may not be the opening-night roster
There is a harder-edged subplot underneath the bonding itinerary. The Lakers enter camp season carrying more standard contracts than they can keep into the regular season, which means at least one player working out in Slovenia in August is unlikely to be on the roster by late October.
A trip designed to build chemistry doubles, quietly, as an extended audition for the back of the rotation. The front office has also not closed the book on upgrading the forward spot. Jake Fischer said on a Bleacher Report stream last week that the Lakers still have interest in Jonathan Kuminga, even as he threw cold water on the Dallas trade scenarios fans keep floating.
Any resolution there would ripple straight through the group that gathers in Ljubljana, either by adding a new face after the fact or by costing someone his spot. Woike’s detail about two-way players being included cuts the other direction, and it is the generous one.
Players on the roster’s margins are usually the last to be folded into star-led offseason plans, and extending them an all-expenses trip to Europe signals that Doncic intends to lead the entire locker room rather than a curated inner circle. The same inclusive instinct applies to holdovers like Bronny James, whose contract for 2026-27 became fully guaranteed at the end of June and who now begins his first season in Los Angeles without his father on the roster.
The part that should register most
The recruitment thread running through this offseason suggests the Slovenia camp is not an isolated flourish. When Thybulle chose the Lakers in free agency, he spoke with both Redick and Doncic about his role before signing, making this the second straight summer Doncic has been directly involved in bringing players to Los Angeles.
The pattern is familiar to anyone who watched this franchise over the last decade, because it is precisely the role James occupied, from recruiting calls to preseason camps to setting the internal calendar. What is different is the stage of career at which Doncic is taking it on.
James arrived in Los Angeles as a made man with three rings and a fully formed organizational playbook, while Doncic is assuming the same responsibilities heading into just his second full season with the franchise, coming off a playoff exit and with his prime years still in front of him. The Lakers have bet the next decade on the idea that he can carry both the on-court load and the franchise-defining one, and August in Ljubljana is the first time he has answered that bet with something concrete rather than something spoken.
Training camp will reveal whether four days of workouts, golf and sightseeing translate into anything measurable, and no bonding trip has ever won a November game on its own. What the trip has already accomplished is settling the question that hung over this franchise from the moment James signed with Philadelphia, because the Lakers no longer need to wonder who sets the tone in that locker room.
The tone is being set in Slovenian, and the whole roster is flying out to hear it.
