Nikola Jokić's Legacy As An All-Time Great Sports Unicorn Is Already Ironclad
Reflecting on one of the greatest individual postseason runs we've seen in a long, long time...
Basketball fans, welcome.
The site has been going for a few months now and yet this is the first Basketball post I’m writing.
But what a way to start.
I’ll be brutally honest right from the very get-go here - I don’t watch as much of the NBA as I would like.
For writing purposes and for the benefit of the site, I’d say hockey and baseball are my two main areas of expertize and focus, while I like to think I can more than hold my own when it comes to writing and talking about the NFL.
Sadly, after all of that, I just haven’t had a lot of time to write about my beloved Knicks or give my musings on the continuing, overwhelming era of player power in the NBA or Kyrie Irving’s latest in a long, long, long, long line of reindeer games.
But, I do pay attention to the NBA, I watch as many games as I possibly can and I’ve been very, very aware of what’s been going on in Denver with the Nuggets and a certain Mr. Nikola Jokić for a while now.
And, after the Nuggets snapped a 47-year streak with no championships after beating the Miami Heat 94-89 in Game 5 of the NBA Finals on Monday, it is time to slap one huge exclamation point on Nikola Jokić’s greatness.
There’s been a plethora of talk about arguably the greatest player in basketball right now, pertaining to Jokić’s overall legacy and where he ultimately stands among the true all-time greats of the game.
I’ll leave that conversation to the true basketball experts and people a lot, lot smarter than me, but one thing I do know is that I’ve never seen a player like Jokić grace a basketball court before, and I don’t think we’ll see anything quite like it ever again.
Jokić really is like a mythical unicorn, a once-in-a-lifetime, uber-talented, freakishly gifted, human cheat code of a player that is pretty much the near perfect package.
If you were constructing the ideal modern-day NBA player in a lab, Jokić would be the blueprint.
I mean, talk about a true gift from the Basketball Gods.
And what makes Jokić so damn fun to watch on a nightly basis is the fact he’s as close to basketball perfection as you can get. He combines sheer, impressive physical force - 6-11, 284lb - with such grace and finesse on the basketball court that you can’t help but stare at his imposing figure the whole game. Watching Jokić do his thing is like watching Picasso paint one of his masterpieces, except with a few more violent strokes of the brush.
He can dance around the court with all the beauty of a ballet dancer, his shooting features the precise, delicate touch of a painter at work, his twenty-twenty vision makes him one of the most skilled passing big men of all time, and he goes about his work with a ruthless determination. He’s a cold-blooded killer that isn’t afraid to go for the throat.
Jokić is an unconventional but truly bewitching package of true basketball excellence that has become almost impossible to figure out.
There is no stopping Nikola Jokić.
We’re all fascinated and obsessed with the unknown and, when the bruising, brute force of Jokić is on TV, you can’t but help stop whatever you are doing and watch the NBA’s greatest show put on another grand masterclass.
And the résumé has always been there too.
Jokić is a two-time NBA MVP, he’s broken record upon record upon record and made history consistently over what has now been an epic three years plus run. He’s accomplished all there was to achieve in the regular season, and he put his team on his back and willed them to sporting immortality this postseason with an all-time epic playoff run that will live on in basketball lore forever.
And that’s all that was missing prior to this year.
After all, every all-time great player needs a proven postseason résumé, but they also need a historic playoff run where they cement their greatness and their legacies. Wayne Gretzky had plenty of such runs, as did Tom Brady, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. Derek Jeter is considered an all-time great because he was able to elevate his game on the biggest stage when it mattered the most.
That’s why NHL fans are waiting for Connor McDavid to win a Stanley Cup in Edmonton so he can tick off the last box on the list to truly be considered one of the best to ever do it.
You need that postseason success in order to enter rarified air.
Go through the list and any truly iconic heavyweight of their sport has a defining postseason run to their name.
That’s the difference between the greatest of all-time and the very, very, very good players.
Jokić has now rubber-stamped his place in the former category with what he’s done over the last couple of months.
The five-time All-Star finished Game 5 with game highs in points (28) and rebounds (16), including 10 in the fourth quarter, and he finished his jaw-dropping postseason with 600 points, 269 rebounds and 190 points.
Jokić emphatically proved that he is the best basketball player on the planet right now.
No one has truly accomplished what Jokić has this year and, again, I don’t think anyone will.
He’s truly special and that isn’t even coming close to doing one of the best to have ever done it any true justice at all.
It was fitting then that, after leading the 16-4 Nuggets to the top of the mountain, Jokić was crowned the Finals MVP, becoming one of just 11 players in NBA history with at least two regular-season MVPs and another in the Finals.
That speaks to Jokić’s unassailable greatness.
And, I mean, the Nuggets were just a damn fun team to watch all year with so many compelling storylines to follow.
I mean, almost lost in Jokić’s looming shadow is the role played by Jamal Murray, Jokić’s partner in-crime and Denver’s rising second star who has just completed a comeback story for the ages. Murray missed the entire 2021-22 season because of a devastating knee injury suffered at the end of the previous season, yet he returned from a vengeance to play a starring role in the Nuggets’ ultimate success.
Murray had 14 points, eight rebounds and eight assists in the Game 5 clincher, capping off a truly dreamlike run in which he became the first player in league history to record at least 10 assists in each of his first four NBA Finals contests.
The 26-year-old truly belongs in the NBA’s landscape of stars now.
And it wasn’t just Murray. Denver’s roster was littered with high-end role players who all stepped up and made a sizeable difference throughout this run. Players like Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown and Michael Porter Jr.
You need depth in order to succeed in the postseason and the Nuggets’ ability to put an elite supporting cast around their biggest shining star paid off in the most euphoric way possible.
There seems to be no limits to what the Nuggets can go and achieve now they have finally conquered their big white whale after falling on the big stage so many times before.
And there’s also no limits to what Jokić can go on and become, even if he has scaled the seemingly impossible heights this sport has to offer already. The most unique sports unicorn we’ve ever seen - who also averaged 30.2 points, 14 rebounds and 7.2 points assists in the Finals and became the first player in NBA history with multiple triple-doubles in his first Finals - is standing atop the very pinnacle of the basketball world right now and his rapid ascension to becoming one of the very best of all time has been truly mesmerizing to watch.
He’s essential viewing and he proved that emphatically throughout a postseason run that will live long in the memory.
