Nikola Jokic: Adaptable

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, it is the one that is most adaptable to change.”

-Charles Darwin

You’re reading this upside down, you know. You have been since before you actually learned how to read it. You were re-computing well before you were perambulating, let alone reading. The eyeballs you’re using to see this work just like camera lenses:

But your highly-adaptable self figured out that the “movie” you were seeing was upside down long before you can even remember, and your brain has long been doing the job of flipping that back over to something more sensible.

But that must have happened so quickly because you were basically mental jelly, right? You were a baby, so what else did you have to do with your free time? Well, not so fast. Scientists have experimented on full-grown adults, giving them glasses that flips the world back upside down, at least as far as they can see. Though the speed of it varies slightly, most people’s brains flip that visual data back to “normal” in a few days or less. Taking the glasses off goes back to normal even quicker.

It’s not limited to your sense of vision. Entire towns have “lost” their sense of smell by living too near a source of stench their brains cannot accept. See an example by checking out Dead Horse Bay’s history sometime. Bottom line, our bodies will allow us to accept all sorts of new conditions. That Darwin guy may have just been on to something.

Adaptability is also a hallmark of some of the NBA’s long-term greats. Your Denver Nuggets faced Vince Carter and the Atlanta Hawks the other night in a game that ended up far closer an affair than Denver fans might have hoped. Carter became the first player in NBA history to play in four unique decades, coming into the league as a high-flying dunk machine, quickly becoming must-see fare across the league. Twenty-two seasons later, Vinsanity is mostly Vinsane for his unexpected longevity. He’s simply overhauled his game time and again to serve important roles on eight of the league’s thirty squads. One of the all-time greats and great guys, both on and off the court.

Which made it even more surprising that Half-Man, Half-Amazing was half-pissed with Nikola Jokic for some reason at the end of Monday’s game. Joker has also found a certain flexibility in his game to adapt to the needs of his team. At the beginning of this season, it often seemed as if he had to be prodded to score, with a five-game stretch in which he averaged 8.4 points per game. After his performance against the Mavericks on Wednesday night, Nikola was visibly embarrassed at saying he was trying to score as much as possible. You get the feeling he may have been responding to a request or seven.

But score he did, his 33 points a marvel, until you consider how paltry they seemed in comparison to the career-high 47 he hung on the Hawks on Monday. Hmm. Maybe that’s why Vince was half-fouling, and half –grumbling about the game’s outcome. Denver needed their surest thing in that moment, and both squads dared Jokic to score instead of being sliced to death by the thousand tiny cuts Jokic’s cutters represent.

Quietly, Jokic’s scoring has become one of the team’s surest things. It’s been 19 games since a single-digit scoring performance, and if the next one comes in service of a win, he’ll be the last person to care about such a streak. The 40/ppg streak of the last two games is just another example of Jokic’s willingness to serve where needed. After being willing to take a power forward role in his beginnings with the team, he was the first to volunteer himself to the bench when it was obvious the experiment wasn’t clicking. When called out for his defensive weaknesses, Jokic has stepped up his game to the point of being a net positive, with his brains, brawn, positioning, anticipation, soft hands, and deft footwork now far outweighing his lack of climb-the-ladder athleticism.

That’s one of the trickiest things about being an opponent of Jokic these days. Where Carter adapted his abilities over the course of his career to fit his advancing age and fill in the needs of his team, Jokic adapts as needed, game over game. He will pass or score from whichever spot on the floor you decide you’ll leave him. But pay too much attention, and it’s death by assist.

Yet again, this Denver Nuggets squad has tied the best start in their history in the NBA. The Nuggets 26-11 record over these 37 games is tied for the best start in team history, with only one other season matching it. That season? Last year, with Jokic leading mostly this same crew. With this squad being even deeper, Denver should beat the beatable Cavaliers at home on Saturday. If they do, they’ll be off to their best start since their ABA days. That they’ll be able to say so without having yet played anything close to their best basketball… that ought to put the league on notice that these Nuggets may finally be adapting to the hurdles that have kept them from their ultimate goals.