Obsidian/00.03 News/How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player.md

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# How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player

In June, as the last seconds of the N.B.A. Finals ticked off the clock and the victorious Denver Nuggets began to celebrate, the team’s star, Nikola Jokić, stood by himself. He shook hands with members of the defeated Miami Heat, pulling them close, cradling their heads with his enormous palms. He clapped a few times, rhythmically, with the crowd. Bruises were blooming on the backs of his pale arms; confetti fluttered around his shoulders. His prominent nose, which goes a reddish pink during games, returned to its normal color. Someone handed him a towel, and he wiped the sweat off his face. Then the ESPN reporter Lisa Salters approached him for a postgame interview. Jokić is nearly seven feet tall, and he had to crane his neck to hear her.

“Nikola,” she began, and he nodded, as if to confirm that this was, in fact, his name. “They didn’t go away,” she said, talking about the Heat. “You had to take it.” Jokić praised his opponents, then admitted that it had been an ugly game. Although he had scored with ease, in his inimitable, gape-mouthed way, the Nuggets had missed more shots than usual, relying, atypically, on their defense to pull them through. “That’s why basketball is a fun sport, you know,” he continued. “It’s a live thing. You cannot say, ‘Oh, *this* is going to happen.’ ” It was a truism—sports are unpredictable—but also a distillation of his peculiar genius. Jokić, one of the most daring and original players that basketball has ever seen, makes the game seem at once logical and chancy, in the way of living things. On the court, he and his teammates become a single organism; he is its brain. “I think he has the mind of all five positions,” the Nuggets assistant coach [David Adelman](https://www.theringer.com/nba/2023/4/19/23688556/nikola-jokic-denver-nuggets-passes-screens) said, last spring.

Traditionally, a basketball team is organized into discrete parts. The tallest man fights for control near the rim, waiting to be fed passes for close-range baskets. Guards and wings fly around the perimeter of play, dribbling, passing, taking longer shots. Jokić can do all these things. He can also take the ball on a handoff outside the three-point arc, drive toward the basket, and, while misrouting defenders with his eyes, sling the ball across the floor to a player who has materialized in the corner. He can grab a defensive rebound with one hand and, in the same motion, throw an overhand pass to a player racing toward the basket on the other end of the court. He knows where his teammates are going to be before they arrive, and he sends the ball there to meet them.

In the past two decades, the N.B.A. has implemented rules limiting certain defensive tactics; coaches, meanwhile, have become savvier about which shots lead to the most points, and how best to generate them. The game has grown faster, and the players have spread out to cover more of the court—the words of the day are “pace” and “space.” Basketball commentators also talk about “reading the floor,” which is shorthand for the act of decoding the shifting patterns formed by moving players and coördinating a joint action in response.

Jokić is a master of this new geometry. “He sees plays before they happen,” [LeBron James](https://www.newyorker.com/tag/lebron-james) said, after the Nuggets swept the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. (James accurately noted that he does, too.) More than once, in a big moment, Jokić has recognized an elaborate play that the other team is about to run, based on the arrangement of its players, then quickly instructed his teammates on how to break it up. And he is endlessly adaptable. In the opening game of the finals, he attempted few shots in the first half but had ten assists, and the Nuggets had a seventeen-point lead. By the end of the game, an easy win for Denver, he had twenty-seven points. Jokić’s movements are not silky, exactly—his shooting form is more sea lion than Steph Curry—and yet he plays the way water moves across rocks, finding the path of least resistance, even when that path is hard for others to see.

[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a27813)

“Don’t look at me. Look at the relaxing art work.”

Cartoon by Edward Steed

It’s glorious to watch. It is also, seemingly, hard to market. Since Michael Jordan retired, for a second time, in the late nineties, a handful of stars have been deemed the world’s greatest basketball player. Of these, Jokić is certainly the least famous. Basketball is a sport, but the N.B.A. is a business, orbited by other businesses—some of which, these days, are individual players, who refer to themselves unself-consciously as brands. Jokić isn’t on social media; he has called it a waste of time. And, though he is noticeably affectionate with his teammates, he seems to prefer the company of horses. (“I like the smell of them,” he has said. “The best feeling ever is when you feed them.”) When I e-mailed Jokić’s Serbian agent, Miško Ražnatović, a former pro who has helped bring a number of Eastern European players to the N.B.A., and asked about interviewing his client, I got a one-sentence reply: “He doesn’t speak with media.” Jokić, like all N.B.A. players, is required by the league to make himself available to reporters after games, but otherwise this is true. Jokić recently gave a rare one-on-one interview—to a teammate, Michael Porter, Jr., who has a podcast. Porter asked Jokić how he felt about the public’s attention. “It just feels sad,” Jokić said.

Denver, where Jokić has spent his entire N.B.A. career, is not New York or Los Angeles or even Boston. In one of those cities, megastardom might have found him regardless. But Jokić, who played professionally for a couple of years in Serbia, as a teen-ager, was largely unheralded when he became eligible for the N.B.A. draft; he was chosen with the forty-first pick, in the second round. (No one else selected lower than the fifteenth pick has ever become the M.V.P., an award Jokić has now won twice.) He had a nebulous body. Even after he began to thrive, as a rookie, some fellow-players didn’t know what to make of him. Julius Randle, of the New York Knicks, recently recalled the first time he faced Jokić. “I’m, like, Man, why is this dude killing, bro?” Randle said. “Slow and fat. He ain’t nice like that, I guess, in my head. And, bro, he came, he played—he hit, like, twenty-five. I’m, like, Man, how the hell did this happen?” When LeBron James and Giannis Antetokounmpo picked teams for the All-Star Game last season, in a televised event, Jokić, the reigning M.V.P., was left onstage until only he and the more modestly talented Lauri Markkanen remained. Thinking he was last, Jokić walked up to James and tapped him on the shoulder. James laughed, then mispronounced Jokić’s name.

On the court after the finals, once Jokić had finished speaking to Salter, his two older brothers, Strahinja and Nemanja, both wearing Serbian Jokić jerseys, found him among the crowd. Strahinja, who is nearly Nikola’s height and covered in tattoos, grabbed him below the waist and hoisted him off the ground. Jokić finally smiled, then rested his cheek on his brother’s head. He kissed his wife, picked up his baby daughter, and hugged Nemanja. After he walked away, his brothers lingered, repeatedly tossing the Nuggets’ compact head coach, Michael Malone, into the air.

Later, at a press conference, a reporter asked Jokić how he was feeling and whether he was looking forward to the championship parade. Jokić appeared worried, and asked a team staffer when the parade would be. Thursday, he was told. “No,” he said. “I need to go home.” He sighed and rubbed his forehead with his index fingers, as if easing a deep pain. “We succeeded in our jobs and we won the whole thing,” he said. “It’s an amazing feeling.” He added, “There is a bunch of things that I like to do. I mean, probably, that’s a normal thing. Nobody likes his job. Or maybe they do. They’re lying.” He twitched an eyebrow.

In the end, Jokić stayed until Thursday, went to the parade, got drunk on top of a fire truck, and addressed the more than half a million people who had gathered in downtown Denver. “You know that I told you that I don’t want to stay on parade,” he said. “But I fucking want to stay on parade. This is the best.”

During the summer that followed, sightings of Jokić, back in Serbia, popped up sporadically online. He was at the racetrack in his home town of Sombor. He was at a club, dancing like a man who’s had a drink or ten. He was partying, shirtless, with the tennis champion Novak Djokovic nearby. His teammate Aaron Gordon, a long-limbed power forward from California, came to visit, and they went to see Jokić’s beloved horses race. In October, when training camp for the new season began, Jokić was asked if the summer after Denver’s long road to the title was the most fun he’d had since his N.B.A. career began. “No,” he said. “I think it’s actually the opposite.” Asked why, he said, “Because we played two and a half extra months.”

The Nuggets opened the season with four wins before losing to the surprisingly good Timberwolves, in Minnesota. On a warm Friday evening in early November, they returned to Denver, to face the Dallas Mavericks. Ball Arena, where the Nuggets play, sits just off one of the city’s main thoroughfares, a short walk from downtown. The arena abuts rows of restaurants and bars on one side and, on the other, a long expanse of flatland leading to the Rockies. The sunset over the mountains was particularly vivid that night, but its colors were nothing compared with the floor inside the building, which had been painted with a blue so bright it almost glowed. The game against Dallas was Denver’s first in the In-Season Tournament, an N.B.A. innovation intended to drive interest—and TV ratings—early in the league calendar. To signify the game’s specialness, a garish novelty court had been laid down.

Watching Jokić, one learns that the common definition of athleticism is too narrow.Photograph by Brian Babineau / NBAE / Getty

Just before tipoff, in a nightly ritual of preparation, Jokić cupped his hands and blew into them, a musician tuning his instrument. Jokić is an exceedingly physical player—he sets savage screens and grapples constantly with defenders; after every game, his triceps are covered in scratches—and yet the overriding impression he leaves is one of gentleness. That’s not because his body is soft but because of the way he uses those hands, and their long, precise fingers. When the writer [Thomas Beller](https://www.amazon.com/Lost-Game-Book-about-Basketball/dp/1478018836/) e-mailed Ražnatović, Jokić’s agent, with a question about his client’s deft hands, Ražnatović replied, in all caps, “*I EXPLAINED MANY TIMES TO THE PEOPLE, THAT HE HAS BIGGEST TALENT IN FINGERS THAT I HAVE EVER SEEN*.”

That talent was soon on display. About three minutes into the game, after the Nuggets guard Jamal Murray missed a jump shot, Jokić, with his left arm wrapped around the arm of a defender—whom he both pinned and used as a lever—flicked the ball, on the rebound, into the basket, as if waving it in off his fingertips. Jokić touches the ball more often, per game, than any other current player does, but he rarely keeps it long: his [seconds per touch](https://www.wsj.com/articles/nikola-jokic-denver-nuggets-mvp-11674162165)—one of countless stats tracked in the increasingly analytical world of pro basketball—is not among the top hundred and fifty in the league. In a spectacular but also entirely typical sequence, earlier in the season, he handed the ball to Murray and cut to the basket. Murray threw the ball back to Jokić, who, instead of catching it, simply punched it to Gordon. Gordon passed it back, and Jokić scored easily. The crowd gasped, then roared.

The Mavericks came into their game against the Nuggets undefeated, and they have their own M.V.P. candidate in the Slovenian star Luka Dončić. But shortly into the second quarter the Nuggets were winning by sixteen. Jokić was playing near the basket and hitting just about every shot he took. As the buzzer sounded for halftime, he sank a long three-point shot and let out a rare yell. The crowd erupted. He finished one assist shy of a triple-double, and the Nuggets won easily.

Afterward, Jokić dutifully fulfilled his postgame press obligations, keeping his deep-set eyes mostly trained on his hands, mumbling throughout. I asked him about the one downside to his adventurous style: his passes aren’t always caught; sometimes the other team ends up with the ball. Against Dallas, he’d had four turnovers, and the team as a whole had had seventeen. Did the Nuggets need to worry about balancing creativity and caution? Jokić said that they could play smarter, and made a self-deprecating reference to a “behind-the-back pass to nobody” that he’d thrown. In truth, up close, even his turnovers often look purposeful. “If I see something, even if it’s risky, I am going to try it,” he once said. “Because maybe that mistake is going to open up something else—or, next time, it is going to be there. Just to give it a chance.” Jokić nurtures the game, in other words; he makes it grow. When Malone, the coach, took his turn at the microphone, he praised his star. “He doesn’t fight the game,” he said.

A few years ago, Dejan Milojević, who coached Jokić when he played for Mega Basket, a team in Belgrade, told [*Sports Illustrated*](https://www.si.com/nba/2020/05/28/nikola-jokic-nuggets-the-serbian-way) about a drill he used to run with his players. A big man would catch the ball, then either pass or try to score, depending on the number of fingers—odd or even—that an assistant coach, standing on the sidelines, was holding up. The drill was meant to speed up the players’ decision-making. Jokić was so good at it that Milojević enlisted two assistants to stand on opposite sides of the court; Jokić was required to look at each of them, calculate the total number of fingers the pair were holding up, and then, based on whether the number was odd or even, make his move. Jokić could do this, too, Milojević said.

Basketball has been among the biggest sports in Jokić’s homeland since at least the nineteen-seventies, when Serbia was part of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslavian team won two world championships. Jokić grew up playing it in Sombor, a leafy town in Serbia’s northwest, near its borders with Hungary and Croatia. (“It’s nice,” he once offered of Sombor. “You can Google it.”) He and his brothers lived in a two-bedroom apartment with their parents and grandmother. They played full-contact games of basketball on a little indoor hoop; Strahinja and Nemanja were as aggressive with their kid brother as they were protective of him. Jokić has spoken fondly of a day when Strahinja threw knives around Jokić’s head because he refused to climb a tree during a picnic.

[](https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a28307-rd2)

Cartoon by John O’Brien

Strahinja became a pro in Serbia, and Nemanja got a scholarship offer to play at the University of Detroit Mercy. Another Serbian star, Darko Miličić, was already in Detroit—he had been selected by the Detroit Pistons in the 2003 N.B.A. draft, as the second over-all pick, just after LeBron James. Nemanja [moved in](https://www.si.com/nba/2017/02/08/nikola-jokic-denver-nuggets-the-joker-serbia-darko-milicic) with him. Miličić partied hard and eventually flamed out. Nemanja enjoyed the N.B.A. life style, too, he has said, but he didn’t make it to the N.B.A. He got as far as the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Steamers, of the Premier Basketball League. The Steamers folded after one season, and Nemanja returned to Serbia.

Jokić was seventeen when Nemanja came home, in 2012. By that point, the youngest of the three brothers was not only the tallest but also the most obviously gifted as a player. Jokić didn’t watch many N.B.A. games as a child, because they came on around three in the morning. But then YouTube caught on, and Jokić caught up. In a piece for the Players’ Tribune, from 2016, he described watching old highlights: “Magic because of his passing, and Hakeem because of his post moves, and Jordan because he is Jordan.” The piece was titled “[How We Play Basketball in Serbia](https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/nikola-jokic-nuggets-serbia-basketball),” and Serbians do, in fact, have a distinct approach to the game. Aleksandar Nikolić, who coached Yugoslavia’s national team in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, introduced a developmental philosophy: all players, no matter their size, should learn to play each position. “When I started playing basketball, I was tall, and I knew down the road I’d play forward or center,” the Serbian Hall of Famer Vlade Divac, who was on the Lakers and the Sacramento Kings, told me. “But, playing youth basketball, the coach made me play guard and handle the ball.” Divac, who eventually grew to seven feet one, became an unusually adept passer. When he played for the Lakers, in the nineties, his stats were announced on the morning news in Belgrade.

Jokić joined a team in Novi Sad, a little south of Sombor. Miško Ražnatović, who owned Mega Basket at the time, began to notice Jokić’s box scores in the local paper. He recruited him to his team, which was founded in part to develop young players. It has been startlingly successful: in the past decade, the teams that have produced the most N.B.A. draft picks are Kentucky, Duke, U.C.L.A., Michigan, and Mega Basket.

Milojević, who was Jokić’s first real professional coach, told Ražnatović that the young center was not yet in physical shape to play professional basketball—and also that he was going to be a star. He encouraged Jokić’s creativity, which was already evident. “He was throwing all these ridiculous passes—and it drove me crazy,” [Milojević said later](https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/29948370/nba-playoffs-afar-watching-lakers-nuggets-game-3-serbian-barkley). “But I saw something wonderful, so I didn’t want to focus his mind on mistakes. I let these things go so he could grow and learn from them.”

N.B.A. scouts soon learned Jokić’s name. But there existed what Tim Connelly, the executive who drafted Jokić, called an “optic bias.” “Unathletic” was the polite way of putting it. Jokić copped to a fondness for Coke by the litre and for *burek*, a Serbian pastry usually filled with meat or cheese. In 2014, when he went to P3, an athletic center in Santa Barbara where the physical dimensions and abilities of N.B.A. prospects receive microscopic scrutiny, he recorded one of the shortest vertical leaps that the trainers had ever seen—just seventeen inches. But, watching Jokić, one learns that the common definition of athleticism is too narrow. The discomfort that some people had with his body blinded them to his unusual physical gifts: remarkably rapid footwork, raptor-like vision, dexterous hands and arms. The evaluators at P3 also test how fast a player can get his hands to the height at which the ball typically bounces off the rim. At this, Jokić was among the ten quickest players of all time.

The Nuggets executives were impressed, but had little idea of what Jokić would become. They used their first pick that year to acquire a different Balkan big man, the Bosnian center Jusuf Nurkić, taking Jokić later. Jokić was confusing, as a player—despite his height, he played below the rim; he could control the pace of the game, but often did so by slowing it down. For a while, Malone, who had just been hired as the coach, started Nurkić and had Jokić come off the bench. Then he tried playing them together, which was a disaster. In Jokić’s second season, ten days before Christmas, Malone slotted him in as the starting center, and Denver’s offense exploded: although Jokić didn’t always score much, the Nuggets’ offense fared better when he was on the floor. Some Denver fans refer to this date on the calendar as “[Jokmas](https://www.denverstiffs.com/the-celebration-of-jokmas-nikola-jokic-denver-nuggets-nba/),” and celebrate it every year. (Nurkić was soon traded to another team.)

Jokić got an apartment in Denver, and his girlfriend, Natalija, who had grown up near him in Sombor, moved in. So did his brothers. The ultra-competitive indoor games recommenced. The Nuggets steadily improved, and in 2019 they won a playoff series for the first time in a decade. Their series in the next round went to a decisive seventh game, which they lost. Jokić was the star, and played a gobsmacking sixty-five minutes in a quadruple-overtime loss, in Game Three. He had long since dropped the Coke habit. But, by the end of the playoffs, he was drained. Jokić played for the Serbian national team that summer, during the World Cup, and his lack of conditioning became obvious; the team finished a disappointing fifth. He decided to adopt a much more rigorous training program, which he still follows. (After sweeping the Lakers last summer, he was seen leaving the celebration to lift weights.)

One of the most dependable ways for a basketball team to score is for the players without the ball to move constantly, cutting across the court and circling back and setting screens. This is exhausting; even the world’s best-conditioned athletes aren’t going to keep it up without sufficient motivation. Because Jokić passes so much, and so quickly, he makes all that movement worth his teammates’ while. If they pass the ball to him, they know it will find its way back to them. If they cut, easy baskets will be theirs.

And the more that Jokić played with his teammates the better he was able to anticipate exactly where their hands would be, and when. He developed an especially uncanny connection with Murray, the guard, a quick player with a great jump shot. In the 2019-20 season, which was interrupted by the *COVID* pandemic, the playoffs were held in a so-called bubble, in Florida. There, Jokić and Murray led the Nuggets to the third round. Handing the ball back and forth, and circling defenders, they did a kind of dance, creating space to operate, throwing off opponents who had to account for the myriad possibilities of what might happen next. The Nuggets ultimately lost, to the Lakers, but [Murray and Jokić’s brilliance](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/jamal-murray-and-nikola-jokic-basketballs-best-buddy-comedy) was a bright distraction in a dark time.

During the following season, Murray tore his A.C.L., and Jokić learned to bear the load alone. He began to accept that his prowess as a passer opened up space for him to score—opponents were loath to double-team him, knowing that he’d find the open man. He began racking up thirty-point games. Although the Nuggets couldn’t get far in the playoffs without Murray, Jokić won his first M.V.P. award.

Eight days later, he announced that he would not be playing for the Serbian national team in the qualifying tournament for the Olympics. A Serbian tabloid called him a “national traitor” on its cover. Darko Rajaković, a Serbian who now coaches the Toronto Raptors, and who has been following Jokić’s career since Jokić was a teen-ager, said that the decision was understandable, but that some Serbians couldn’t accept it. “It’s different, how we look at playing for the national team,” he said, adding that “the whole country stops when the national team plays.” Braca Djordjević, one of Serbia’s first N.B.A. play-by-play men, told me that Serbians have a fluid relationship to Jokić: pride in his exploits during the N.B.A. season followed by creeping anger as spring turns to summer, if Jokić has declined, that year, to play for the national team. “Jokić is a simple guy,” Djordjević said. “But around him there are a lot of complicated things going on, which he doesn’t want to have anything to do with.”

Jokić and Natalija had married in the fall of 2020. In the fall of 2021, their daughter was born. Earlier in his career, Jokić occasionally participated in profiles that were written about him. Around this time, that ended. “You have to change to protect yourself and your family from external factors that affect your lives,” he said, in a rare intimate interview, which he gave to his sister-in-law, for her blog. He has begun tying his wedding ring into his shoe before games. Sometimes, after the buzzer, he and his daughter each point to one palm, a gesture that is part of a song they like to sing together. He bought a horse, and then another, and then another. He won a second M.V.P. award, and the Nuggets surprised him by presenting it at his stable, in Sombor. Jokić rolled up in a horse-drawn cart, wearing a black tank top and a bulky helmet. A band was there, playing traditional Serbian folk music. Caught off guard by the moment, he began to cry.

On another night at Ball Arena in November, as the Nuggets were handily beating the Chicago Bulls, I left my seat in press row for the media center, a small room full of long tables lined with electrical outlets; a couple of TVs hung on the wall. I wanted to call [Bill Walton](https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/bill-walton-throws-it-down), who I knew would be watching the game at home, in California. In his prime, Walton was the N.B.A.’s best-passing big man. He’s had a second act as a basketball romantic who offers commentary on the game in the manner of Walt Whitman rhapsodizing about a commute to Manhattan. After I got him on the phone, we watched Jokić hit a shot over a Bulls defender, off one foot, falling away from the basket. Walton yelled, “He blooms like a rose, or cascades like a waterfall!” Later, a particularly nice pass to a teammate ahead of the action got him shouting about Jokić again: “He’s like the Arkansas River coming down off Independence Pass!”

Walton is one of only a few players to whom Jokić is plausibly compared. But when I asked Walton about this he brushed off the suggestion. He pointed instead to the speedy and diminutive guard Steve Nash, who won two M.V.P.s in the mid-two-thousands. I hadn’t heard that one before. “Of all the players I’ve ever seen,” Walton said, “Steve Nash is the one who left me awestruck more than anybody else, because he never had a physical advantage.” Jokić, like Nash, creates room to operate by dictating the rhythm of the game, he added. “It doesn’t matter if that pace is faster or slower, it’s just got to be different. Because the difference of your pace creates the separation.”

Some Denver fans refer to the day that Jokić became their team’s starting center as “Jokmas,” and celebrate it every year.Photograph by David Williams / Redux for The New Yorker

When the game ended, I headed to the Nuggets’ locker room. Jokić, elusive as ever, wasn’t there. But it was easy to spot his locker, adorned with two small pictures of horses in harness and a red ribbon that his horse Dream Catcher was given for its first racing win. Next to the locker stood Aaron Gordon, the happy recipient of some of Jokić’s most spectacular lobs. Gordon was drafted the same year that Jokić was, but much higher—he was the No. 4 pick, taken by the Orlando Magic. He was, and is, an exhilarating athlete, but in Orlando he was something of a disappointment. That team didn’t have an orchestrator like Jokić; Gordon had to do too much. Jokić “expands the game,” Gordon told me, and also shrinks it for his teammates, by letting them focus on what they do best. It isn’t only the variety of Jokić’s skill set that makes this possible, Gordon suggested, but the consistency of his character on and off the floor. “He’s just so congruent,” Gordon said.

Basketball players tend to pattern their games on those who have come before. The very best improve upon their predecessors. Jokić shares qualities with many players—the footwork of Hakeem Olajuwon, the interior shooting touch of Wilt Chamberlain—and he comes from a long line of European big men who can pass. But Walton had me wondering if I could find a more direct basketball ancestor. After leaving Denver, I called Larry Brown, who coached for twenty-six seasons in the N.B.A. He suggested that Jokić most resembled the two greats who came just after Walton’s prime: Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.

Bird is mentioned often in connection with Jokić, perhaps because he combined exquisite passing with pinpoint shooting and had a similarly distinctive shooting form—and also, perhaps, because he’s white. Magic, who is not, was the more surprising and, I thought, more apt analogue. An executive with one N.B.A. team told me that Magic is the point of reference he and his colleagues use, too, and not only because the players are both virtuosos of the assist. Magic was nearly Jokić’s height, the executive noted, and seemed to see the whole court from above in much the same way. Later, Jerry West, the great Laker guard who became a general manager and helped build the Lakers dynasty led by Magic, told me that it wasn’t Magic he thought of but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, because “they both played with great finesse.” Then I asked Magic about it. “I love it,” he said. “I think that we dominate with our mind, our basketball I.Q.” He added, with a laugh, “Also, teammates love playing with us. At every level, we excel.”

Two days after trouncing the Bulls, Jokić recorded his hundred-and-eighth career triple-double, in a win against the New Orleans Pelicans, surpassing LeBron James and Jason Kidd for fourth on the all-time list. Next on the list, at No. 3, is Magic. After the game, Jokić conducted his press conference himself. “I can just talk, because I know what you’re gonna ask,” he announced, proceeding to offer answers to unspoken questions. Soon, Jokić was leading the league in points, assists, and rebounds. Murray had missed a few weeks with an injury, and so Jokić was taking more shots than ever, and making most of them. In one four-game stretch, he missed a total of five shots; during a nine-game stretch, more than eighty per cent of his shots went in. No one had scored so efficiently in the course of so many attempts since Wilt Chamberlain, nearly sixty years ago.

Chamberlain is one of just three players to win the N.B.A. M.V.P. three seasons in a row. (The other two are Bird and [Bill Russell](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/bill-russell-was-basketballs-adam).) When Jokić seemed on the verge of joining them, last season, a mostly genteel, occasionally stat-filled fight broke out among N.B.A. commentators. Was he really as great as all that? At the time, he had not yet won his first title. How could someone with no championships be set alongside the greatest players of all time? Was this happening only because he’s white?

The foil for Jokić in these arguments was another great center, Joel Embiid, from Cameroon. Embiid, who plays for the Philadelphia 76ers, is graceful and muscular and looks every bit the N.B.A. superstar. Like Jokić, he learned some of his skills from YouTube; he has said that he searched the phrase “[white people shooting 3 pointers](https://www.theplayerstribune.com/articles/joel-embiid-its-story-time).” He is a cerebral player, too, but can’t read the floor quite as well as Jokić—no one can—and dominates the ball in a way that Jokić does not. Last season, he got the better of Jokić in a high-profile game, and was eventually named the new league M.V.P. Then the Sixers lost in the second round of the playoffs. This became additional material for the dispute, which persists, encompassing questions about race, reputation, and the state of defense in the N.B.A. Asked about the controversy, Jokić said that Embiid deserved to win, and that to suggest otherwise was “mean.”

In the middle of January, the Nuggets began a swing through the Northeast, starting with Philadelphia, where Jokić faced Embiid for the first time this season. Embiid, who is scoring at a historic rate, seemed to relish the prospect, at one point jumping off the bench to enter the game when he saw Jokić readying to return, as if going mano a mano. It was a tight, entertaining contest. Jokić had nineteen rebounds and scored twenty-five points, but Embiid scored forty-one, and the Sixers pulled away at the end. Still, Embiid, after the game, acknowledged that Jokić maintained a hold on the title of world’s best player. “He’s the finals M.V.P.,” Embiid said. “Until someone else takes that away.” A few hours later, Jokić was spotted with teammates having a beer and chicken wings at a local bar.

The next day, Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, contacted Malone to tell him that Dejan Milojević, Jokić’s coach at Mega, had died of a heart attack, at the age of forty-six. Milojević, who was known as Deki, had become an assistant with the Warriors. “A perfect man,” Jokić called him, in 2022. “When I grow up,” he added, “I would like to be like Deki.”

The Warriors postponed their next two games. The Nuggets went to Boston, to play the Celtics, who were undefeated at home, having won twenty straight. That evening, in front of the Garden, a frigid wind whipped down Causeway Street.

About ninety minutes before the game started, Jokić came out of the tunnel that leads to the court and found a chair. He sat by himself for a long time. Then he walked onto the floor, drifted in a few hook shots, and settled into his routine. When the game began, he tripped on the Nuggets’ first possession, losing the ball. On the second, he missed a shot near the basket. On the third, he threw a pass out of bounds. Then he began to control the tempo. He made seven of his next eight shots, and assumed his usual role as the game’s center of gravity. He played nearly forty minutes, and the Nuggets won by two. Afterward, Jokić declined to speak. ♦

 
 

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