The Best Basketball Player Alive Got Better Again

While this is a small sample, everyone else is playing in a small sample too, and 13.4 percent of the season played so far isn’t insignificant. Jokic currently has a 91.9 percent chance to win MVP per Basketball Reference’s MVP award tracker, as the man who has finished in the top two of the last five MVP votes looks certain to make it six years in a row.

Jokic’s win shares per 48 minutes (WS/48) this year is .4680, and per this advanced metric, that currently stands as the greatest season in NBA history by several light years. The second-greatest WS/48 season ever is Shai Gilgeous-Alexander’s incredible MVP defense this year at .3527 (which demonstrates how great small samples do warp this figure–the full-season WS/48 leader is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s 1971-72 season at .3399). Still, the gap between Jokic in first and SGA in second is larger than the gap between SGA and 194th place, Karl Malone’s .2371 WS/48 figure in 1991-92. It’s not hyperbolic nor inaccurate to call what Jokic has done through 11 games the pace for the greatest NBA season ever. It’s practically impossible to be hyperbolic about what Jokic has done so far this year.

The best player alive got better, a sentence that has been true every year for the past five years. I feel bad for those who ignored Jokic because he doesn’t play in a major media market or those who spent much of this time caught up in the stupid debate ESPN and Kendrick Perkins and all the other gasbags created around a man that LeBron James said he was in awe of like seven years ago. Those who know ball saw that ball players crowned Jokic somewhere around the 2020 bubble where, if not for Mason Plumlee leaving Anthony Davis alone on a play that will live forever in my nightmares, maybe Jokic has one more title and LeBron never gets his championship in Los Angeles and today’s NBA narrative is very different.

In either direction of that fateful Western Conference Final, Nikola Jokic’s unprecedented ascendance from being drafted during a Taco Bell commercial to the G.O.A.T. debate is still the central story in this first post-peak LeBron, Steph and Durant era of the NBA. If you missed the joy that Jokic’s greatness brings to basketball so you can condescendingly dismiss him like 2021 era Kendrick Perkins, or sing his praises without watching his games like 2023 era Kendrick Perkins, I pity you. You have missed out on some of the purest basketball that you will ever see. As a Nuggets fan I genuinely do not know how I will ever be able to enjoy this sport to the extent I have with Jokic once he’s gone. This is a once in a lifetime athlete whose true love of his horses will likely take him from us sooner than any basketball fan wants. I cannot stress this enough: enjoy Jokic’s greatness while you still can. Go in on a League Pass subscription with your friends if you have to. Nikola Jokic has made the Denver Nuggets appointment television this year. We will likely never see something like him ever again.

And Jokic still has never played with an all-star. Jamal Murray plays like an all-star when winning time comes around, but Jokic has defined this era by creating all-stars around him. I remain convinced that you could take ten guys at the YMCA and put them around Jokic and they would beat one of the NBA’s worst teams during their late season tanking malaise. Every single person who gets placed next to Jokic plays the best basketball of their life because Jokic’s unselfish genius makes sure of it.

Clippers coach Tyronn Lue was asked about Jokic’s 55-point scoring explosion last night, and he explained how they wanted Jokic to score. It may sound counterintuitive to the Perkins-style hot take artists who don’t watch Nuggets games, but this is the correct way to beat Denver that all the smart teams try while all the dumb teams double team Jokic so he can create a layup or an open three for someone else. That Jokic has turned that strategy on its head through 11 games by becoming potentially the greatest and most efficient individual scorer in basketball history is yet another puzzle piece he has added to the equation that the league now needs to go back to the drawing board to solve.

Every year Jokic gets better. And not a little better, there’s always some big improvement in his game. It’s nuts. At some point you would think the best player alive would reach a point of diminishing returns, but the hardest worker in sports’ only consistency outside his staggering consistency is that he keeps defying everyone’s expectations. Jokic was a turnstile defensively once upon a time (if you are still making this argument, you are letting people know you haven’t watched basketball in at least five years), and now he’s one of the league’s better paint defenders who anchored a championship defense. He was too timid to shoot, and teams dared him to and he cost the Nuggets games by over-passing. Now he’s a 40-plus percent three-point shooter ruining teams’ rebounding coverages as their lankiest defenders get dragged to the perimeter by his black hole-level basketball gravity. Before last night, the Nuggets were 0-3 in games where Jokic scored at least 50 points. Now they’re 1-3. Every time the league thinks they have a proven strategy to beat Jokic, he calmly reveals another trick up his sleeve.

Nikola Jokic is not just the best player in the NBA, he is on pace to force himself into greatest basketball player of all time conversation alongside Michael Jordan and LeBron James and Wilt Chamberlain and Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. I know many NBA fans are trained at this point by 2021 era Kendrick Perkins to scoff at assertions like that, but why wouldn’t the guy breaking so many of Wilt’s previously untouchable records be in the G.O.A.T. discussion Wilt is in too? If you have not watched Nikola Jokic this year, you should rectify that as soon as possible, because you have not seen the best version of who may eventually be regarded as the greatest basketball player of all time.