On Saturday night, Denver Nuggets forward Paul Millsap found himself standing toe to toe against Orlando Magic center Nikola Vucevic. The two hunched into athletic stances at mid-court in preparation for the game’s opening tip. The odds were stacked in Vucevic’s favor as referee Marc Davis approached them with the basketball in hand. The 7-foot tall native of Montenegro had four inches on the 6-foot-8 power forward opposite of him.
When the ball went up, Millsap didn’t even bother jumping. He just watched as Vucevic leaped, swung his massive right arm into the sky and tipped the ball back to teammate Aaron Gordon.
Millsap hasn’t fared well in his role as the player Denver designates to compete for opening tips. He’s yet to win one in the Nuggets’ first 14 games of the season.
“Joker didn’t want to do it, so…” Millsap said Wednesday.
Millsap was referring to Nikola Jokic, the Nuggets’ starting center who at 6-foot-10 is 2 inches taller than Millsap. On most NBA teams, the tallest player is responsible for lining up to try to win the opening tip. But the Nuggets are not most teams. Jokic has many talents — a feathery soft touch, unfair vision, a high basketball IQ. One area in which he struggles, though, is getting very far off the ground.
“When Nikola jumps, sometimes it looks like he’s just standing there,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone joked Wednesday.
During the preseason, Jokic asked Millsap if he’d be open to jumping for the opening tip. Millsap hadn’t been the man in the middle vying for the first possession of a game since his college days at Louisiana Tech in the mid-2000s. But Jokic was so adamant that Millsap eventually agreed.
“He didn’t want to do it,” Millsap said. “He just didn’t want to do it.”
That left Millsap to fend for himself against the game’s giants. Already this year, he’s lined up against 7-foot-3 Kristaps Porzingis, 7-foot-2 Rudy Gobert, 7-foot-1 Timofey Mozgov, 7-foot Steven Adams and 6-foot-11 Dwight Howard. The 13 centers Millsap has competed against — he’s faced Mozgov twice — have combined to tower over him by 52 inches.
“I have a nice record of winning them during the game,” Millsap said. “But tip-offs at the beginning, it’s different.”
After going 0-for-14 to start the year, Millsap said the Nuggets haven’t had any discussions about switching things up. Winning the opening tip in the NBA isn’t that important anyway because the team that loses it still gets possession at the start of the second and third quarters, and, unlike in college, there is no possession arrow. Even so, Millsap is open to making a change.
“Maybe we’ll switch it up,” he said. “Maybe I’ll let (6-foot-9) Wilson (Chandler) do it. I don’t think I’ve won one all year, so we’ll see what happens.”
Turning to Chandler is an option. Going back to Jokic is as well. Malone likes to poke fun at Jokic’s jumping ability, but he acknowledged the third-year Serbian center’s craftiness could come in handy when trying to win Denver the game’s first possession.
“He might not be able to jump very high, but what he does is steal the tips,” Malone said. “I was around one of the best ever at that, Zydrunas Ilgauskas, in Cleveland. Couldn’t jump over a piece of paper either, but he was so great at timing the tip and stealing it that he won a lot of those.
“We’re going with Paul right now. But we’ll see what happens.”
