21–22 NBA Previews: The Denver Nuggets (#3)
Each day, as the amount of time I have left to live gets imperceptibly shorter and shorter, I find my appreciation of the little things growing. One of those little things is watching Nikola Jokić play basketball. I love this dude, but more than that I love the way his team plays with him—the way they seem to swirl around him. This season, in the absence of Jamal Murray, it’s been beautiful to watch Jokić work with Will Barton, for example. Other great players impact the game like a hammer impacts a nail, but Jokić is different. He’s like the possibility of a nail being coaxed into position through its own free will.
Last night, the Denver Nuggets utterly dismantled the Dallas Mavericks. Jokić, of course, is at the center of this. Through five games—including one in which the big fella suffered a knee contusion and only played 15 minutes—the Nuggets are running away from teams to the tune of 19.7 points per 100 possessions with Jokić on the floor. On a rate basis, Jokić is gobbling up more rebounds and grabbing more steals than he ever has, and he’s making I’m pretty sure roughly 100% of his shots (his eFG% is currently 71.6!).
Amazingly, none of that is even what he’s best at. Yes, he’s a genius-level rebounder and an improving defender, and an impossibly good shooter. Sure. His best skill remains his passing ability, and more than his passing, it is his ability to warp the realities of space. There is this scene in Interstellar where David Gyasi explains how a wormhole works. He draws two points on a piece of paper and connects them with a straight line, then he folds the paper in half and pokes a hole through the two points. No line at all. Suddenly, you are there. I’m pretty sure that’s how this pass works.
To my mind, a pass like the one in that linked video isn’t even possible. I mean that literally. To throw that pass, your brain needs to be operating on a level I could never access. It’s not just the pass, it’s the rebound, the transition from rebound to pass, the feeling in your heart that a teammate is all the way down the floor, sprinting, ready. It’s the ability to know something without actually knowing it yet—the marvel of a kind of anticipation that isn’t really anticipatory, but rather is based in the true facts of the case as they stand.
When the Spurs beat the Heat in the 2014 Finals, they did it by creating a system of ball movement that could force open holes in an otherwise perfect NBA defense. The Heat had an incredible ability to fly around and cover up gaps, and against most teams that ability became ferocious: they ate up space the moment it appeared. The Spurs, because they managed to play lineups in which every single player could throw quick, smart passes, were able to stay ahead of a defense that was already ahead of everyone else.
Jokić, at his best, is like taking that Spurs team and condensing it into one player. He’s so tall and strong and unpredictable in his movements that there’s basically no accounting for him. Normally, a team needs to make multiple really good passes in order to open up space against a good defense. Jokić is capable here and there of opening up that space all by himself, and as I wrote above, it’s beautiful to watch the way that capability opens up possibilities for his teammates. When Jamal Murray got hurt last season, it was devastating because it shot a hole in the side of a contender for the title, but also because it deprived us of the privilege of watching the Jokić/Murray combination. This season, beginning the year without Murray, it almost feels like the whole team is getting a chance to form their own Jokić combinations. It turns out Jokić/Barton is beautiful too. Jokić/Porter, too, come to think of it. Jokić/Campazzo? Hell yes. The list goes on.
Anyway, I think the Nuggets are going to win the West this season. I think they are the best team, and I think they are the team most impossible to counter. I think Jokić’s improvisational genius is the most underrated force in basketball. I’ll end with a stat, just to prove that we’re still in reality. Last season, when, by the way, he was the MVP of the damn league, Jokić posted a PER (player efficiency rating) of 31.28 per Basketball Reference. That number was the 10th highest single-season number of all time. The only players ahead of him are Steph, LeBron, MJ, Wilt, and Giannis. Through five games this season, Jokić is at 36.9. Certainly, players have had higher numbers over five-game stretches before, but I think it is entirely within the realm of possibility that Jokić is about to post the highest single-season PER in the history of the league this year. There was some hand-wringing last season about whether Jokić was a worthy MVP, but he’s not even really in his prime yet. Over the next 10 years, we’re going to learn there was never any reason to worry about that. Jokić is an all-timer. Please enjoy him.