37 points, 18 rebounds, 15 assists. The first NBA player to reach these numbers in a game, and Nikola Jokic did it on a Sunday night in Denver, snowy pockets of flurries settling over the city. I wish I’d been collecting these stat lines all along, or had thought to make a note on the calendar when they happened. I’d like to see if there’s a pattern, though I’ve got a hunch that the dates would come to mean less than what the volume of them proves: in Jokic’s hands, the unprecedented becomes routine.
It starts with his skill, we know this. But let’s zero in on how he carries himself around the floor, how he moves. Jokic lopes, jogs, shuffles, occasionally bops, tends to move laterally more than he does in a direct line. It all serves to create an illusion that he’s slow and behind the pace. It’s why so many have a difficult time categorizing what it is he’s doing — he doesn’t work the way a basketball player does, tends to be the refrain. It’s because he looks, most of the time, relaxed
He can also appear pressed, like there’s someplace else he’d rather be. This is not the kind of approach we like to see from our stars. If they don’t look dialled in, if it doesn’t look strenuous at least some of the time, we tend to distrust their effort and skill. But Jokic’s arduousness is some of my favourite in the league, because it presents at our expense. And indeed, it must be exhausting to prove nearly every night that you can manipulate the game at every level.
When Jokic reaches, when he jumps, when he catches the ball in his palm and slingshots it in slow-motion to a ready teammate, he bends the game. The rhythm of a seemingly simple, one-handed pass goes fast as he catches the ball, then time slows to inversion as he gathers the kinetic force of the ball in motion and redirects it, then accelerates once again as the ball goes blazing through a split-second open outlet he somehow saw coming. And it isn’t an anomaly, he does it all the time. When he’s being double and triple-teamed, when he’s collapsing around the waist because someone has just run into him in an attempt to slow him down; he does it in mid-air, redirecting his own rebounds, flicking them away like an air traffic controller. He’s already leading the league in assists this season with 11.7 per game, with Trae Young, Ja Morant, James Harden and LeBron James — all point guards save for James, the basketball Swiss Army knife — trailing.
Last night against the Mavs, when Jamal Murray slung the ball from midway up the key over his shoulder to Jokic, wide open beyond the arc, Jokic’s hands were waiting. He caught the ball lightly, adjusted his footing and brought his right shoulder forward, then launched a rainbow three. There was absolutely nothing hurried about him, four minutes left in the 4th quarter of a close and contentious game. The same went for his drive down the lane with 54 seconds on the clock, Daniel Gafford and Naji Marshall throwing their bodies into him, Jokic missed the layup and bunny hopped up for his own tip-in, easy. The routine of Jokic, tipping the ball out for a necessary late-game steal or bulldozing Klay Thompson and Kyrie Irving to make space for Murray so he could make the winning shot with six second left, there’s an art to it.
Turning the extraordinary into something so routine, he’s used to it. It doesn’t mean that we’ll ever be.
