“Basketball Rule #6
A great team
has a good scorer
with a teammate
who’s on point
and ready
to assist.”
-Kwame Alexander, The Crossover

Growing up with a comic book usually stashed somewhere on my person, I tended to love my superheroes. Some of my favorite comics in memory involved some form of mashup between supers, usually referred to in comics as the crossover. Reads like Civil War, Daredevil/Batman: An Eye For An Eye, and even Archie Meets the Punisher (no, really) have been the ones that often lit me up the most. The idea has been such a winner since the beginning that the early comics crossovers eventually begat superteams like the Justice League and The Avengers to really push the comic ecstasy to its limit.

In basketball, a great crossover is something akin to superhero move, but just a wee more mortal. The crossover in hoops is more a hand switch during a dribble to quickly shift direction around a defender who is ultimately blocking your path. If you’ve seen an “ankle breaker” in hoops, odds are good it came as a result of a killer crossover.

Wildly, your Denver Nuggets have worked their way into a crossover of both basketball and superhero sorts. One where they are mashing up a pair of legends who not only have combined their superpowers, but are notorious for having a wealth of ways in which they can attack the game. Very few knew it would be possible before they actually started playing. Much of Nuggets Nation and the larger portion of the national basketball literati said this pairing had very little chance of working, present company included.

And fully falling on that sword, and maybe even more surprising than how well Archie and The Punisher got along, Nikola Jokic and Russell Westbrook are meshing more powerfully than Nuggets fans ever dared hope. Who knew the Joker and Brodie would end up more like Batman and Robin?

You had to see it to believe it. To understand it. Once you set the whirligig in motion, the combination of passing, shooting, motion, pace, and intellect suddenly becomes borderline unstoppable. As incredibly well as the Jokic-Jamal Murray pairing has been over their long history, Russ’ ability to be nearly as nimble as Jokic has made their two-man game equally as devastating in less than a half-season.

In retrospect, it’s now simpler to see why they work so well alongside one another, with Westbrook able to routinely set the table for Nikola in ways he has never had, and is quickly becoming accustomed to. Russ’ penetrating drives draw opposing defenses so close to the rim that if he’s able to get the ball in Jokic’s hands, his soft touch is devastating as a scorer, yet Joker is quick enough to turn that pass to a better scoring option if need be. Similarly, as the best player in the league, Joker has the basketball gravity of a black hole, pulling the entire court closer to him, and leaving Russ (and everybody else) with some of the most open looks of their career. Westbrook’s postgame chat after a recent thumping of the Hawks shows his barely-contained glee over what he’s come across.

Like a comic book crossover, their wealth of superhuman abilities seems to translate to everyone around them. While Jokic has played with some talented individuals over the years, he has been the only true force multiplier the Nuggets have had during his tenure, raising all boats around him. But Westbrook has had hundreds of similar force-multiplication outcomes, being the triple-double paragon at the top of the hill that Joker is steadily climbing.

When the pair both had triple-doubles against the Utah Jazz a few nights back, they combined for 52 points, 32 rebounds, and 21 assists. While Nikola put up the larger numbers in every category, Russ had the perfect night, with no misses from the field or free throw line, and no turnovers.

While that one evening was spectacular, it was no one-off. As the dynamic duo has continued to learn one another’s games, they both only continue to lift each other higher. Looking at it that way, it’s no wonder, Boy Wonder. Of the 2,000 or so individual triple-doubles that have occurred in the history of the league, 345 of them belong to Westbrook or Jokic. To put it another way, 237 guys have had a triple-double in the NBA. Between these two jokers, they’ve notched over 17% of them. Astounding.

So, if you look up in the sky for a Nuggets superhero, it’s just as likely to be Christian Braun, Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon, Michael Porter Jr, Peyton Watson, or even still-springy DeAndre Jordan, as Westbrook and Jokic are more often than not the ones setting them up from the ground. But while all those other guys capes are still fluttering to the floor, Joker and Brodie are already off stirring up another adventure, at least until that buzzer sounds.

As Mike Malone said after Westbrook’s perfect triple-double that night, Russ is undoubtedly a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and one who has played alongside some of the league’s very best in his wanderings. Who knew his greatest crossover mashup might come right as everyone wondered if he even had any superpowers left?

“Basketball rule #3
Never let anyone
lower your goals.
Others’ expectations
of you are determined
by their limitations
of life.
The sky is your limit, sons.
Always shoot
for the sun
and you will shine.”
-Kwame Alexander, The Crossover