PORTLAND — First, the Nuggets were an easy target because of him.
“When you talk to teams in the West, they don’t fear the Nuggets,” ESPN’s Brian Windhorst said in March. “… What people will say is that their best player, which is (Nikola) Jokic, is more neutralizable in a playoff setting than a guy like Durant or Curry or Mitchell or James Harden or Paul George. They feel like in a playoff setting, you can defend him.”
“A pretend contender with a pretend superstar,” Fox Sports’ Nick Wright said.
Now the Nuggets have crossed the line from physical to dirty because he blocked out with a little oomph?
“Take a freaking look at this @OfficialNBARefs @NBAOfficial,” Enes Kanter whined on Twitter after Game 3.
“I think it was uncalled for,” Trail Blazers coach Terry Stotts said.
So which one is it? Are the Nuggets a sequel to the 2014-15 Atlanta Hawks or Bad Boys Pistons incarnates? The takes about this team have been all over the place because its best player is Nikola Jokic. There are streaks of Bill Walton and Arvydas Sabonis in his game, but he is a largely unprecedented player. The basketball public has such a hard time properly evaluating him because the idea of a doughy, pass-first big man from Eastern Europe dominating does not compute. There’s no template to go off, so they can’t see what the eyes and numbers have made clear: Jokic is one of the best basketball players on Earth.
“They were talking about, ‘I’m not in shape,’” Jokic said after playing 64 minutes and 58 seconds in Game 3. “I’m in really good shape. I don’t know what they’re talking about.”
It’s time for the “pretend superstar” narrative to get stabbed in the heart Arya Stark-style. Jokic is acing every test in the first postseason of his career. In 10 games, he’s averaging 24.8 points on 49.7% shooting, 12.6 rebounds, 9.1 assists, 1.4 steals and 0.9 blocks. Teams’ only hope of slowing him is sending double teams and praying Denver’s shooters can’t cash in on wide-open 3s.
“He’s magnificent,” Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. “Magnificent. I’ll just leave it at that.”
The contradictions are what makes it difficult to understand him. Jokic might look like a finesse player when he’s directing Denver’s offense from the elbows, but he bludgeons opponents when he needs to. He’s squishy but also remarkably rugged, only missing two games in the regular season and logging 40 more minutes than the next-closest player in the postseason. The number-crunchers love him… and so do stars from bygone eras. Remember: Isiah Thomas helped popularize the Magic Jokic nickname.
“A lot of the analytical people out there love Nikola, because he’s an analytical dream,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “But what’s really impressed me beyond the numbers and the stats has been that competitive fire, that toughness, the not backing down. He’s shown true grit.”
Jokic played 64 minutes and 58 seconds in Friday’s quadruple-overtime thriller, the fourth-most minutes ever by a player in postseason history. Denver outscored Portland by five points with him on the floor and got outscored by eight points in the three minutes he went to the bench. Such a loss could have broken him. Instead, Jokic went to the podium and stayed in character as a standup comedian, continuing his never-ending war with the microphone.
“It’s just a basketball game,” Jokic said before sliding the microphone back into its stand with surgical precision. “I’m feeling good, to be honest, out there.”
It’s just basketball. Jokic has repeated some version of this line close to a dozen times in the playoffs. It’s his way of maintaining perspective on the biggest stage of his life. Clearly, it’s working. The 24-year-old has been the best player in the first two playoff series of his life by a significant margin.
Jokic is a superstar. Too many have made the mistake of grading him on what he looks like compared to what he actually is.
