Nikola Jokic’s Historic Star Performance & NBA MVP Award Cemented His Place Among NBA’s All-Time Greats

DENVER — We must begin this obligatory article about Nikola Jokic as NBA MVP with the obligatory “led the league in X” statistic. When it came to deflections in the NBA Finals, Nikola Jokic was near the top. Moreover, not only on the court.

During the championship round, Jokic was subjected to the gruelling schedule of media availabilities that competitors are required to endure.

He answered dozens of questions about himself with the same level of enthusiasm that most people reserve for their twice-yearly dental checkups or jury duty.

How did he feel when his Denver Nuggets swept the Los Angeles Lakers and advanced to the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history? How has he maintained his humility despite his meteoric rise to fame?

What sort of mark does Jokic hope to make on the game? How much pressure does he feel from Denver and Serbian fans to bring his clubs championship glory? Is there a specific person or thing that motivates him, and has he ever stopped to think about how he got from Sombor to the brink of fame?

Every time, Jokic would deflect the questions and praise to his teammates and coaches, shifting the conversation back to the interplay between the four lines in the previous game and what was needed for the upcoming one.

“I’m just happy that every year we’ve grown as a team and every year we were getting better, and now we are in this situation,” Jokic said after Denver won Game 4 and moved within striking distance of the NBA Finals for the first time in franchise history. However, “I don’t think my journey is that interesting.”

We appreciate the big guy for trying to downplay the significance of his personal history, but he’s completely wrong.

From a hamlet of 48,000 in northern Serbia, Joki has gone on to leave tens of thousands of people at NBA arenas around the country gaping night after night.

From “fat point guard” to “one of the most highly conditioned players” in the best basketball league in the world, able to play more than 40 minutes each game and dominate every second of them in the NBA Finals.

He went from being a Quesarito commercial–selected second-round pick–to being one of only 15 players in history to win two Most Valuable Player awards. From Jusuf Nurki’s humble platoonmate on the bench to the NBA’s brightest star on the league’s top squad.

Jokic, only eight years into a career that will eventually place him in the Hall of Fame, has finally arrived. As a result of the Nuggets’ 94-89 victory in Game 5 over the game but overmatched Miami Heat, the team has been crowned NBA champions, and Nikola Jokic has been voted the 2023 NBA Finals Most Valuable Player.

In the final game of the series, Jokic put on another stellar performance for the Nuggets, leading Denver to a 42-point victory against Miami with 28 points on 12-for-16 shooting, 16 rebounds, four assists, and a block.

For the series, he shot 58.3% from the field, 42.1% from 3-point range, and 83.8% from the free-throw line while averaging 30.2 points, 14 rebounds, and 7.2 assists per game.

Statitudes’ Justin Kubatko found that Jokic is only the 11th player to be named regular-season MVP and Finals MVP several times. The remaining ten?

Famous basketball players who have been inducted into the Hall of Fame include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Wilt Chamberlain, Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Moses Malone, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Stephen Curry, who won the most recent two NBA Finals MVP awards.

Excellent company, to say the least. (It’s worth noting that the NBA didn’t start giving out Finals MVP awards until 1969; this is the only reason why the late great Bill Russell isn’t on this list, even though his name is on the trophy itself.)

One of the greatest individual playoff runs in NBA history is capped off by winning the Finals MVP award. Even though we’ve become accustomed to Jokic’s absurdly high scoring averages, it’s still important to put his postseason success into perspective.

In the postseason, 27 players in Stathead’s database averaged 30 points per game over a 10-game stretch. Of those 47, at least 13 boards were grabbed on a game-to-game basis. Twenty-four of them had nine helpers on average.

At least 30 percent of their teams’ offensive possessions were used by the 14 players who had a true shooting percentage of at least.600.

Only a select few have accomplished all of that in a single playoff run. Your guess is correct.

Heat head coach Erik Spoelstra said of James before Game 1 of the series, “He is one-of-a-kind in the myriad of ways that he can impact the game and impact winning.”

Jokic is only the fifth player in NBA history to record at least 500 points, 200 rebounds, and 100 assists in the playoffs all in the same season. Increase the stakes to 550, 250, and 150, which Jokic easily conquered, and you’re back in a one-on-one situation.

Only Duncan, James, and Dirk Nowitzki have ever produced more win shares in a single postseason than Jokic’s 5.0 in 2023. Only Duncan, James, and Bird have ever been worth more than a replacement player during a single postseason run.

Player efficiency ratings higher than his are held only by LeBron, Kareem, Michael Jordan, and Kawhi Leonard.

That’s some seriously rarified company to be in, and it’s all thanks to Jokic’s enormous impact on the world. With Jokic and Jamal Murray at the helm, the Nuggets posted the highest offensive rating of any champion since the 1987 Lakers, per Kubatko. T

his point-producing juggernaut crushed every team it faced, every defensive strategy devised against it, and every mid-series adjustment made to slow it down.

A two-man game honed over the course of nearly a decade of practise, perfectly complemented by shooters, cutters, and ball-movers capable of finding every crack and crevice in the coverage, crushed Karl-Anthony Towns with Rudy Gobert lurking off the ball, Gobert and Deandre Ayton one-on-one, Rui Hachimura with Anthony Davis behind him, Bam Adebayo fronting with help behind, and the vaunted Miami zone.

“I think it’s just fluid, beautiful basketball,” Murray said after Denver won Game 1 of the Finals, after he had averaged 21.4 points and 10 assists per game during his own remarkable Finals run.

We’re making reads on the basketball court and the ball is bouncing back and forth between us. The brilliance of this team, I believe, lies in the fact that “you’ve got to guard everybody” due to the wide variety of weapons and appearances present.

The Nuggets’ depth and variety of weapons were on full display throughout these Finals, as evidenced by Murray’s phenomenal scoring output in Games 1 and 3, Christian Braun’s 15 points off the bench in Game 3, Aaron Gordon’s monster Game 4, and Bruce Brown’s 21 points, 11 of which came in the fourth quarter, to give Denver a 3-1 lead.

The spotlight of the Finals was shining brightly on those individuals, and they should be commended for taking centre stage.

In large measure, they were able to do so because Jokic weaponizes Miami’s fear of the damage he can wreak on the court through the application of the selflessness that makes him so uncomfortable talking about himself in press conferences.

After Game 4, Gordon remarked, “It’s really rare — it’s a blessing.” Playing with these guys is a blast. These individuals are incredibly selfless.

They love the game so much that they know you have to keep the momentum going and that if you play the proper way, everything will fall into place. A victory is within our grasp. Winning brings joy to everyone.

That belief, more than anything else, is at the heart of what the Nuggets built in the Rockies while the rest of the NBA world was preoccupied with other teams: the belief that you can win more games by working together and passing the ball around than by trying to score as many points as possible individually.

Michael Malone – The Head & Head Coach

Michael Malone, the team’s head coach, attributes all of this success to Jokic.

Malone said this at Sunday’s Nuggets practise in preparation for Game 5: “Culture is not something that you achieve and cross off your list.” Culture is something that needs to be maintained on a daily basis or it will fade away.

Nikola, a two-time MVP and outstanding player, seems to be the perfect embodiment of this. “Everyone kind of falls in line when you have a man who has had as much success as Nikola, who works as hard as he does, who is as selfless as he is, and who trusts as much as he does.

And when everyone is moving in unison, towards a common goal, fueled by the same ideals, you can get a lot done.

Malone has previously stated, “I think [with] Nikola, it’s never about looking backward,” in reference to this series. As a player, “it’s always about looking forward and challenging himself to become the best that he can be.”

The person who has worked more closely and frequently with him than anybody else over the past six years says that the player he developed in this series is the best version of him.

“This is his first MVP award. His second MVP season saw improved statistics. Indeed, his performance has improved, as Murray noted. I expect more from Jokic in the future. I believe there is still more to Jokic to be seen, where he is simply dominant over the entirety of a game even more so than he has been thus far.

This could mean that we have only just begun our trip. Jokic probably won’t want to hear any more about it. And the rest of us? He and what he did will be remembered for a very long time.

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