A Pickup Truck Doing Ballet: Nikola Jokić is Making the NBA Finals His Masterpiece

Hybridity has always been in Nikola Jokić’s basketball DNA; after all, this is a player who was famously drafted by Denver in the middle of a Taco Bell commercial for the quesadilla-burrito mashup known as a quesarito. The pretty, historic town of Sombor, where Jokić grew up, is tucked into the northwestern pocket of Serbia, flush against the borders with Croatia and Hungary; the Hungarian, Habsburg, Ottoman and Austrian empires have all, at various points over the past half-millennium, laid claim to it. Jokić, perhaps fittingly given his origins, has emerged over this postseason as the NBA’s ultimate border-hopper: a center with the touch of a guard, a prodigious scorer who’s better as a passer, the embodiment of total basketball, infinitely adaptable, positionless but always in position, a crossroads in human form.

As Denver tightened their grip on the finals with a coolly commanding Game 3 win in Miami on Wednesday night, a talent that once threatened to go unrewarded with the hard currency of titles has come thrillingly into mint. Jokić’s numbers – 32 points, 21 rebounds, 10 assists – made him the first player ever to post a 30-20-10 game in the NBA finals. But most impressive was the way in which he accumulated these figures, with a freedom and variety that captured the best of his childhood heroes. (...)

The history of the NBA is replete with examples of small men who played against type to impose themselves in the paint: Spud Webb, Muggsy Bogues, Allen Iverson. Jokić is the rare big man who plays against type. Although he’s close to seven feet tall, his greatest skills are those more typically associated with players many inches his inferior: passing, dribbling, ball handling, court awareness. Instead of playing “above the rim” like someone of his immensity normally would, he operates below it; he plays above and around the heads of his opponents, across their backs, through their legs, under arms raised haplessly in defense. The staggering stats Jokić puts up, game to game, will always be the alpha of his claim to greatness, but it’s his refusal to do the things that basketball “bigs” are usually expected to – muscle up in the paint, wait for the ball to come to him, dunk – that form that claim’s omega, that make him so uniquely charming.

If Game 1 of these finals was a passing clinic and Game 2 highlighted his scoring touch, then Game 3 offered a stage for Jokić to demonstrate his mastery of game management. Whatever his team needed, Jokić was on hand to provide it, varying his output in line with the game’s fluctuations in momentum. Through a tight opening quarter he was a defensive monster, controlling the boards with bulky authority and starving the Heat of second balls; in the second quarter he began to take control on offense, deploying his full range of spins, hooks, fakes and dinks – off both hands – in the paint. (...)

Jokić is averaging 31 points, 13 rebounds and 10 assists a game so far this postseason. There’s little doubt he is the best player on the planet right now, an achievement that never ceases to amaze whenever you catch a glimpse of the man – his head pushed forward, the shoulders round and mouth gaping, that ham of a nose sniffing out routes to the basket. One of the world’s greatest athletes is now one of its least athletic-looking. Jokić’s body is like a mattress – blocky and enormous but somehow soft – and he has the upper arms of a management consultant; there is nothing chiseled or ripped about his physique. No matter how many accolades and rings he goes on to win in his career – and there are surely many more to come – Jokić will never, I imagine, stop seeming like a man who’s wandered onto the basketball court by accident on his way to a family barbecue.

Even in peak form Jokić’s machinations on the court seem somehow improbable. The NBA’s contemporary greats all have a signature style of movement. LeBron James thunders, James Harden ambles, Steph Curry bounces, Kevin Durant glides, Ben Simmons sits. Jokic happens – awkwardly, implausibly, and, it sometimes seems, unintentionally, but with a kind of inevitability. At times his limbs seem to get ahead of him like baseball bats spilling from a bag; at others there’s a kind of patterned tranquility about his movements that recalls stop motion animation. Many of his shots are taken off balance, with a single hand, from the waist, above the head, or in a position that suggests that Jokić is about to hit the deck.

Somehow, though, it all works. Surprise is the key to his mastery. Unorthodox, off-kilter and on fire, Jokić is the most delightfully effective gallumpher that basketball has ever seen. If Curry is the master of the half court, a long-range scoring threat from the moment the ball passes the halfway line, Jokic is the master of the full court: a man who can do it all, while never seeming on the cusp of doing anything. To observe him in full flow is like watching a pickup truck do ballet.

by Aaron Timms, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Wilfredo Lee/AP
[ed. Not a big NBA fan, but have been watching the playoffs this year. Jokic is all this and more; and, seemingly the most humble, non-drama player in sports. A worthy successor to LeBron and all the superstars who've preceded him.]