On the night when he was presented with the NBA’s first-ever Michael Jordan Most Valuable Player trophy, Nikola Jokic almost left his new hardware behind at Ball Arena.
Late Wednesday evening, Jokic, fresh off a 43-point performance, walked out of Denver’s postgame interview room and to the player’s parking garage, but without his trophy in hand. “Where is the trophy?” Jokic asked a Nuggets employee. With his keys already in the ignition, Jokic was ready to head home for the night before a team staffer frantically wheeled it out to him. In the end, the trophy went home with the back-to-back winner.
It was a classic Jokic momento to cap off a special and historic night in Denver. He received the inaugural Jordan MVP award in the Nuggets’ locker room after playing one of the most dominant games of his NBA career in the Nuggets’ 141-128 win over the Wizards. Jokic shot 17-20 from the floor — he missed two 3s and only one shot from two-point range — hauled in 14 rebounds and also tallied 8 assists and 5 steals in only 33 minutes of work. Jokic is the first player in NBA history with 43+ points, 14+ rebounds, 8+ assists and 5+ steals in a game.
As a team, the Nuggets made history too. Denver only shot 4-16 from 3-point range but scored 98 points in the paint, the most points scored in the paint by any team in the NBA since the league began tracking the stat in 1998.
But after all of that, the first-of-its-kind trophy that Michael Malone handed Jokic quickly became so much of an afterthought that it was nearly left behind.
“It’s cool,” Jokic said of the trophy. “It’s nice,”
That’s the Nikola Jokic that we’ve come to know over these last eight years. He’s one of the rare athletes who truly only cares about one thing on the court: Winning. The stats are cool. The triple-doubles? Who really cares. The historic efficiency? Eh. The MVP trophies? They’ll be placed somewhere inside Jokic’s house by his wife Natalija. It’s only about winning for Jokic, but also about the relationships he’s forged along the way.
Thursday is the six-year anniversary of December 15, 2016, a day that we’ve come to call ‘Jokmas.’ Ahead of an early-season home matchup against the Blazers that year, Michael Malone made Jokic the Nuggets’ full-time starting center after beginning the season by trying to play both Jokic and Jusuf Nurkic together in Denver’s frontcourt. It was an experiment that failed miserably and ended with Jokic asking Malone to be brought off the bench. On that Dec. 15 night six years ago, Jokic and the Nuggets beat the Blazers 130-122. A new era of Nuggets basketball was born. Jokic, of course, never left the starting lineup.
Jokic was asked Wednesday what he’s most proud of when looking back on the last six years.
“Probably just the connections with the people, to be honest, who work here and who are here on a daily basis,” he said. “I think that’s something that’s going to stay (with me) longer. Yes, the numbers are going to be on the wall, or whatever. Hopefully. But I think the connection to the people here on a daily basis and the daily communciation is going to be something that I’m going to remember. I have really good friends here since I came here, that I met, and they’re really close to me. I think the connection to the people.”
We’ve spent so much energy this season discussing Denver’s disastrous defense that ranks 28th in the NBA — and that topic is of course pressing and pertinent to the Nuggets’ postseason hopes. Michael Malone didn’t even hand out a Defensive Player of the Game chain last night because the Nuggets were so bad on that end of the floor. But let’s take a moment and examine what Jokic is doing on the offensive end of the floor, because it’s been truly incredible. The Nuggets’ offense ranks second in the league at 118.4 points per 100 possessions, per Cleaning The Glass. That number would have led the league by a healthy margin last season.
The Nuggets are posting this incredible efficiency while Jamal Murray has had as up-and-down of a season as one can have. Michael Porter Jr., the Nuggets’ best shooter, has missed 11 of Denver’s 27 games. While the Nuggets are the NBA’s most accurate 3-point shooting team, they take the third-fewest 3s per game. Denver’s bench is hit or miss every night. The Nuggets have been so elite on offense, but there’s still so much room for improvement.
The reason why they’ve been so good is so simple. It’s Jokic, the best offensive player in the NBA who elevates his team and orchestrates an offense better than any player alive. It’s been so easy for Jokic this season too. One of my takeaways from the first-half of Jokic’s current campaign is that he’s not nearly expending the amount of energy that he did over the first part of last year. It has to be by design too. Jokic knows how long of a regular season this is and how he needs to as fresh as possible for the playoffs.
Jokic has played this season with a type of casual dominance that I’ve never seen before on an NBA court.
We’re spoiled that we get to witness what he does on a nightly basis. Watch any other opposing center — from Taj Gibson or Daniel Gafford, both of whom Jokic battled Wednesday, to Joel Embiid or Rudy Gobert — and you come away in awe of just how damn good Jokic is. The nonchalantness of how he moves through a game is the stuff of legends. The passing is revolutionary. The ability to flip the switch like Jokic did in the third quarter Wednesday when he scored 15 points on 7-7 shooting while leaving the defense helpless and without a potential solution is unrivaled.
Somehow, we’re the lucky ones who get to watch this guy every night.
