“The act of observing a phenomenon can change the phenomenon being observed.”
– The Observer Effect
“People may change their behavior when they know they are being observed.”
– The Hawthorne Effect
I spent about a decade of my life singing professionally in an a cappella group, performing thousands of shows across the country. And for about three of those years, I had a problem that was equal parts embarrassing and infuriating.
I couldn’t reliably start the first song of the night in tune.
Not that I couldn’t sing. I’d been doing that most of my life. Not that I didn’t know the notes, or hadn’t sung the same song a hundred times before. But when I was the guy responsible for kicking things off, my adrenaline would sometimes get the better of me, and I’d start about a quarter-step sharp.
I knew it, too. In the moment. Usually got myself back into the groove pretty quickly, but that didn’t make those first few seconds any less excruciating. Particularly when you’re the root of the chord, and the rest of the group is building their harmonies around whatever damned note you just gave them. I’m getting mad just thinking about it.
Three years. Thousands of performances. And occasionally still getting my ass kicked by the first note.
The funny part was that the more I thought about not doing it, the harder it became to avoid.
Science has a couple of names for things along those lines. The Observer Effect, which comes to us from physics, describes how the act of measuring something can change the thing being measured. Its behavioral cousin, the Hawthorne Effect, suggests that people may behave differently simply because they know they’re being watched.
Neither is a perfect description of what happens to a singer with the yips, or an athlete with an entire sporting world staring at him. There’s a fascinating something in that overlap, especially when the thing being watched is one of the greatest basketball players who has ever lived. Because Nikola Jokic is about to do something extraordinary.
Again.
Following Wednesday night’s win over New Orleans, Joker sits at 200 career regular-season triple-doubles, just nine behind Russell Westbrook’s all-time NBA record of 209. Ten more gives the big Serbian sole possession of a mark that, until Russell Westbrook came along, seemed destined to belong to Oscar Robertson for forever.
And with that countdown underway, the basketball boys over at DNVR got to discussing exactly how long it might take Jokic to get there. Wind, Vogt, Adam, and D-Line all offered their best guesses, some of them considerably more optimistic than others.
I’ll get to their predictions, and my own, a little further down the road. I want to talk about something else first. The closer a person gets to something historic, the harder it can become to do the very thing that got them there.
Stephen Curry knows a little something about that. If you’ve been a basketball fan at all these last few years, you probably remember this one…
Back in December of 2021, Curry was closing in on Ray Allen’s all-time three-point record, something everyone knew was coming, and something nobody could stop talking about. Curry had spent his entire career making shots that would get most players benched for attempting them, and at a clip that made him seem unstoppable. But suddenly Steph found himself having some decidedly un-Curry-like nights.
Three makes in 14 attempts against Philadelphia. Five in 15 against Indiana. Not exactly a crisis for most NBA players, but when the guy in question is the greatest shooter of all time, and everyone in the building is waiting for the next one to fall…
Even Steve Kerr acknowledged that Curry was pressing a little. Curry himself admitted that some shots were forced. Draymond Green talked about how the teammates around Steph were getting caught up in wanting to help him get there.
Which is a pretty fascinating wrinkle. It wasn’t just the guy approaching the record whose behavior was changing. It was the people around him, too.
Baseball fans might remember Aaron Judge spending an awfully long eight games trying to get from home run No. 60 to No. 61 in 2022, and then another six days before finally reaching 62. His manager, Aaron Boone, believed the weight of the chase was affecting him, even if Judge himself wasn’t particularly interested in admitting it.
And then there’s Roger Maris, whose pursuit of Babe Ruth’s 60-home-run record in 1961 became a fairly miserable experience for the man living through it. Endless questions, relentless scrutiny, sleepless nights, and even reports of his hair falling out from the stress.
He still hit 61.
Curry still broke Allen’s record, and has since put enough distance between himself and everyone else that the next guy might need a telescope. Judge got to 62. It’s not that these guys don’t clear the hurdle… it’s just that they are a few amongst dozens of stories of the effects of that hurdle coming on.
The point isn’t that pressure always wins. Sometimes it barely makes a dent. Sometimes it changes the way someone plays, and sometimes it changes everyone around them.
But the idea that even the coolest customers in professional sports can be affected by the attention surrounding a record? That seems pretty well established. Which brings us to a man who may be the coolest customer of them all. Or at least the one who has gotten awfully good at making us think so.
I’ve never completely bought the idea that Nikola Jokic doesn’t care. He cares. A lot.
He cares about winning, about doing things the right way, about the people he loves, and about the teammates who depend on him. And yes, of course about his horses. Examples dotting his life. You don’t become the player he has become without caring deeply about your craft, your surroundings, or without having an almost pathological interest in getting things right.
What Jokic has become particularly good at is keeping the things that don’t matter from interfering with the things that do. I suspect that’s where a lot of his famous indifference comes from. Not a lack of feeling, but a rather carefully constructed set of walls around the things he actually values. Walls that allow him to keep the circus outside, even when he’s the main attraction. But those walls aren’t magic.
I don’t believe for a second that Jokic is immune to the psychology of approaching an all-time record. I don’t think anybody is. What I do believe is that he’s one of the finest adjusters the game has ever seen, and that whatever this moment asks of him, he’ll find a way to deal with it.
Maybe he speeds up. Maybe he slows down. Maybe he gets sick of answering questions about it and starts giving even shorter answers than usual, which would be an impressive achievement in its own right.
Or maybe he simply continues playing basketball the way he believes basketball ought to be played, and leaves the rest of us to lose our collective minds over the numbers.
There’s a catch with triple-doubles, though. Unlike Curry, who could simply decide to shoot another three-pointer, Jokic can’t manufacture every part of a triple-double on his own. He can make a perfect pass, but somebody else still has to put the ball through the hoop for it to become an assist. Rebounds require missed shots, and the cooperation of a ball that occasionally has its own ideas about where it wants to go.
And his teammates? I would bet most of them want this record for him even more than we do. Just like Draymond described for Steph.
They revere the man. Not just the player, but the friend and teammate. There’s also a little bit of their own history tied up in his, as the men who helped one of the all-time greats hang his name at the top of one of the holy hardwood lists. They’re about to be a part of that legend themselves. One small piece of the mountain of numbers that got him there.
So what happens when Jokic has nine assists with four minutes left, and everyone on the floor knows it? Does somebody shoot when they otherwise might have passed? Does Joker get annoyed that they’re trying to help? Does he feed the ball to the guy with the best look, whether it gets him an assist or not? I know which one I’d bet on.
And I know that if the best thing for Denver is for Jokic to sit a game, or spend an evening scoring instead of passing, he won’t lose a moment’s sleep over what that does to his triple-double total. The record matters to us. Winning matters to him.
That distinction may end up being the difference between a record that falls in a hurry, and one that takes a little longer than the numbers suggest.
And boy, do those numbers suggest a hurry.
Jokic has recorded 200 triple-doubles in 814 career regular-season games, good for 24.6% of his appearances. A quarter of the time he’s stepped onto an NBA floor, he’s finished with double digits in three different statistical categories. That’s already nuts, and a wildly faster clip than anyone else in the NBA’s all-time top ten.
But that career number includes the early years, before Jokic became the fully operational basketball supercomputer we’ve been enjoying for the better part of a decade.
Last season, he recorded 34 triple-doubles in 65 games. 52.3%.
More often than not. More. Often. Than. Not.
A triple-double has become more likely than not when Nikola Jokic plays an NBA basketball game. Sorry, I know you get it… I just don’t know how many times I need to say that to myself before it stops looking like a typo.
He also had 34 the season before, and through four games this season, he’s already got two more.
At his career pace, ten additional triple-doubles would take around 41 games played. At last season’s pace, it’s closer to 19. And if he keeps doing what he’s done so far this year, we’re talking about 20. That’s exactly what the DNVR guys discussed.
Twenty games to pass a record that was considered practically unassailable when Oscar Robertson held it at 181, and seemed headed for another long reign when Westbrook finally passed the Big O and just kept on going. Both men have had more in a single season than Jokic, but Joker’s consistency has been… otherworldly.
It’s also worth remembering that Jokic doesn’t distribute these things on a tidy every-other-game schedule. He’ll put together a ridiculous streak, go several games without one, and then rattle off a few more as though he’d simply forgotten to do it for a while. He goes as the game dictates, and he’s the only one who has the compass he’s judging that by. He’s remarkably right in his assessments.
The percentages give us a baseline, but they don’t tell us which games he’ll miss, which nights Denver will need him to score 40, or which evenings he’ll finish with nine rebounds and be perfectly content to go home with a win. Maybe even a little gleeful at the anguish it may cause the rest of us hanging on every notch on the belt he doesn’t even want to be wearing.
And they certainly don’t tell us what happens when the entire basketball world starts counting down from five. Four. Three…
Which brings us back to our friends at DNVR. Harrison and D-Line have apparently decided that Nikola is done fooling around.
Their prediction? November 20 against Houston. Ten triple-doubles in ten games. To be fair, his career-best streak is five in a row, twice. So the idea is outrageous, but somehow still not impossible. Anything is possible when it is Nikola Jokic doing it, and he may just want so badly to get past this distraction that he will step on the gas in ways only he can.
Would you want to bet against him? I suppose if you’re going to bet on somebody to do something preposterous, Jokic is a pretty good place to start.
Vogt was slightly more restrained, landing on December 17 against Atlanta, while Adam pushed things to December 19 against the Lakers. Those numbers make sense, as the 17th would match Joker’s average from last season, and the 19th matches this season’s run rate. All four gentlemen have a perfectly defensible rationale, with the possible extra grain of salt for the two who seem to believe Jokic has recently discovered a cheat code. I know if he runs off nine in a row now, I’ll have to send Harrison and Eric my deepest public apologies.
And I don’t think any of them are crazy to believe this will happen sooner rather than later. If last season’s pace holds, the record could fall before we’ve all finished giving holiday gifts. But I’m going to give him a little more time.
Saturday, January 2, 2027. At home, against the defending champion New York Knicks.
That’s roughly Game 27 on my countdown, starting with Friday night’s visit to Phoenix, a game I’ll be lucky enough to attend. The NBA Cup could shift the schedule, and we’re counting Nuggets games rather than Jokic appearances, so any nights he sits would push the prediction a little further out. We just all know how much he hates to sit.
So… Why January 2?
Partly, it’s just a swag in the middle of the 25-30 games I actually think it takes him.
And also partly because I think the closer Jokic gets, the more everyone around him will become aware of what’s happening. The questions will get louder, the attention more intense, and the countdown impossible to avoid. Imagine one of his teammates getting a question akin to, “Do you wish you would have hit the shot that would have gotten Joker another triple double tonight?” Good god.
And also also partly because I think Jokic will refuse to force a triple-double when the smarter basketball play is something else. There may even be nights when he could very easily chase one, and simply doesn’t bother. Won’t even be paying attention.
And also also also partly because I’m simply allowing for the possibility that he’s human. Like Steph was. Like Judge was. Like Maris was.
Not something that makes it take forever. Just enough to stretch 19 games into something closer to 27. But I also wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he makes Harrison and D-Line look like a couple of basketball Nostradamuses, and the rest of us look like idiots for trying to apply ordinary human expectations to a guy who has spent the last decade making those expectations look ridiculous.
He’s done it before. A lot.
The thing about all of this is that we’re not really arguing over whether Jokic will break the record. We’re arguing about which date to circle on the calendar. For decades, Oscar Robertson’s 181 triple-doubles looked like one of those records that might never fall. Westbrook eventually passed it, and then kept right on going, finishing his climb to 209. Russ even spent last season in Denver, developing a mutual respect with the man who is now about to take his record away, and even adding a couple more triple-doubles of his own onto the tally. There’s something pretty wonderful about that.
And unless Jokic decides one of these near-term summers that he’d rather spend the rest of his days with his horses, I suspect 210 will eventually look like a fairly modest number next to whatever he leaves behind. Like Russ. Like Steph.
I’m not going to guess how high that number gets. Jokic has always struck me as the kind of guy who might play until he’s 40, or wake up at 34 and decide he’s had enough of the whole damned thing. Whenever that day comes, it will be sooner than any of us want. I wonder if he actually will reflect on the amazing things he has done in his retirement, as he often teases he will, or if he’ll be too busy with the many other things that occupy his head and his heart. I kind of suspect the latter. He seems most averse to patting himself on the back. It’s hard to imagine him riding off into the sunset doing it.
For now, we’re watching a man approach a record that another extraordinary player only recently made his own, and doing it at a pace that makes the whole thing quite inevitable. The date isn’t inevitable. The manner of it certainly isn’t. If the history of other great athletes tells us anything, it’s that the final few steps toward immortality can occasionally be the most awkward.
Even for a guy who seems to have forgotten how to take a wrong one, but always seems to be taking the most-magically awkward one. Maybe our prediction is less about when Jokic will break the record than about how long the rest of us can resist making a big deal out of it.
You can see how all of that is going. 🙂
