Luka Doncic and Michael Porter Jr. are engaged in a weird social media feud

When Michael Porter Jr. was the No. 1 high school basketball prospect in the nation, Luka Doncic was just some Wonder Boy halfway across the world, far from casual 2018 NBA draft class consciousness. But as Porter slogged through a back injury-plagued freshman campaign at Missouri, Doncic rose to fame, leading Real Madrid to a EuroLeague championship and capturing MVP honors on the way.

When the draft came around, it was Doncic that the Dallas Mavericks traded up two spots to select third overall, and Porter dropped to the Denver Nuggets at No. 14 amid concerns he might miss the entire 2018-19 season with back and hip problems. One played his way into prominence, and the other suffered injury through no fault of his own, entirely disassociated from one another. Outside of their paths crossing on the same meaningless mock drafts, there’s no real reason to link one to the other.

Naturally, they are now feuding in the form of social media likes.

Michael Porter Jr. ‘likes’ calling Luka Doncic overrated

Here’s how it went down. ESPN posted results of their panel’s 2018-19 Rookie of the Year projections, with Doncic receiving 58 percent of the vote and Porter not even making the list, because, you know, he might not even play until the 2019-20 season. The fine folks at @mpjcenter, an Instagram page entirely devoted to Michael Porter Jr. stuff, noticed that Porter liked a comment under the ESPN’s panelist projections that read: “This is terrible, luka is the most overrated person I’ve seen in my life.”

We can only imagine @tbuckets_3 knows Doncic well enough to determine Doncic is the most overrated person he’s seen in his life. As for how he feels about him as a player, we do not know. This just seemed like a personal vendetta by someone Doncic wronged, maybe by dunking on him in Europe, where Luka was the best basketball player at 19 years old. Then, Porter jumped on board.

We can also presume that Porter has put enough thought into this to determine for himself that, yes, Doncic is an extremely overrated person. Maybe Luka cut him in line at the salad bar before the draft, just like he cut 11 spots ahead of him in the actual draft. And how dare he get drafted ahead of MPJ.

Again, we do not know how Porter feels about Doncic as a player, because that was neither specified in the comment nor through the like, but we can only guess that he can’t possibly consider the guy who won MVP of every league he participated in during the 2017-18 season “the most overrated.”

Luka Doncic ‘likes’ calling Michael Porter Jr. overrated

Wait, it gets more interesting.

News of Porter’s Instagram like traveled far and wide, so much so that Doncic’s former teammate in Spain, Dino Radoncic, commented on a story about it. “MVP of Euroleague can’t be overrated,” wrote Radoncic on Twitter. “A injured player who has not played 5 college games can be overrated. #Facts”

And then Doncic liked that.

This is where, if Doncic and Porter were playing basketball against each other instead of passive-aggressively liking derogatory comments about each other, a bunch of dudes would be falling over each other with their hands on their mouths and yelling, “Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, snap.”

The NBA does not release its full schedule until Friday afternoon, so we’re not sure yet when the Mavericks first face the Nuggets. Porter may not even be healthy enough to play in the matchup, so they’ll just have to interact with each other through random social media likes until that time comes.

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Ben Rohrbach is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at rohrbach_ben@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter! Follow @brohrbach

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