Pulling all the strings

I was 12 the first time I met Magic Johnson, and as much as I tried to keep it together, he was already a superstar and an NBA Champion in his very early career. The amount of attention Magic drew all over L.A. was only rivaled by the attention he grabbed on a basketball court. Magic bringing the ball over the halfcourt line immediately bent the defense of whoever L.A. was playing. Magic was the guy who could pull the strings that made all the other team’s puppets move. Now, here I was, standing in a very long line of admirers. All I wanted was a jersey signed, and I’d rehearsed exactly what I was going to say…

“You’re my favorite player ever, and I think you’ll break every record by the time you’re done.”

I had it. My favorite player ever. You’ll break every record. My favorite player ever. You’ll break every record. I got to the front of the line, and Magic took my jersey with a smile.

“YOU’LL BREAK EVERY PLAYER, YOUR RECORD IS MY FAVORITE EVER!!!”

We stared at each other for a moment. All I could hear was white noise. Mom says he thanked me. Mom and I moved out of the line.

I’m not sure if he’s playing straight with me or not, but when I met him again in my late 20’s, and again just before 40, he claimed to remember that exceptionally awkward exchange. I have a feeling he may just be being kind with me, given the number of people who have met and fawned over him over the years, but that kindness is always flattering. I’m always sad I lost that jersey.

While Magic didn’t break every record, he certainly placed himself amongst the elite on so many all-time lists. He’s high up on assists, assists per game, a ton of playoff metrics (a 14.0 APG avg in a Finals Series!!!), and more, but one of the lists he seems to often speak of is his career triple-double numbers, and how great they might have been if not for a lost end to his career. Magic had his sights set on Oscar Robertson and that list long before Russell Westbrook did, with Russ passing Oscar in the last couple years as he actively hunted the stat.

You have to wonder if some of Magic’s admiration of my current favorite player is begrudging in the slightest. Maybe at least when it comes to climbing a certain list he favors.

Five games into the 2023-24 NBA season, the consistently indescribable Nikola Jokic has already had two triple-doubles, and could care less than any of us, of course. With the year barely begun, Joker continues to climb lists of his own, now the Nuggets all-time leader in winshares and most advanced metrics, and now fourth on the org’s scoring list. As to Magic’s favorite list…

Jokic’s two triple-doubles pushed him into a three-way tie for fourth place with all-timers Jason Kidd and LeBron James, and while LBJ could theoretically get another one before Jokic does, Nikola is obviously racking that stat up at a far greater clip. Whoever ends up above the other for the rest of this season (koff, Jokic), at least, will probably find themselves the sole holder of fourth and the other fifth, with Kidd locking up sixth for the foreseeable future, a full 29 games above the next name on the list, Wilt Chamberlain.

Funny now for Jokic to be looking back down on Wilt from so far above, when we early Joker fans were breathlessly wondering if he might ever actually catch Chamberlain after putting up six triple-doubles in his first season and another ten in his second. At those rates, catching “The Stilt” at 78 seemed a very feasible stretch outcome for the unexpected wunderkind.

Over time, Jokic’s pace has shifted a little, with 29 triple-doubles last season, alone. The Joker vaulted that Stilt long long ago. Nikola is a world-class string-puller of his own. His next hurdle on the list has a little Magic in him.

If Jokic ends up matching last season’s output this year, he’ll be within four of third-place Johnson by season’s end, and astoundingly only a couple of similar seasons away from the incomparable Big O. What initially seemed inconceivable… this foreign-born, small-town, low-risk draft pick even hoping to someday head this list… has suddenly become a very real possibility. The guy who doesn’t care about the stat at all should soon pass the guy who cared about what it said about his game (Magic), then probably pass the guy who is synonymous with the stat (Oscar), and then maybe even surpass the guy who has often cared about little else, and is still occasionally stacking them up (Westbrook).

While the only stat that matters to Jokic is binary, and involves a W or an L, this triple-double stat that may end up defining him is the one that mattered so much to some of the game’s most influential players. The guys who manipulated every facet of a game. When all is said and done, Nikola Jokic may have pulled the strings on the game of NBA basketball more deftly than anyone before him.