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(New York, NY) — Nikola Jokic is putting up an offensive showing, the likes of which have never been matched in league history, and the numbers back it.
The reigning back-to-back Most Valuable Player is in a tight, three-way race for MVP at the moment, but where he excels beyond his competition is on offense. He’s not the league-leading scorer that Embiid is, or even the dominant force in the paint that Giannis is, but even with those things considered, is in his own tier on the offensive end this year.
It may sound far-fetched, but the numbers say the same.
Jokic’s assist numbers have dropped to the point he no longer averages a triple double. It’s a coin flip whether or not he’ll end the year averaging one, considering he’s a measly 0.1 APG away, but if he managed to get back, he’d join Oscar Robertson and Russell Westbrook (who did it three different times) as the only players to ever do so. Both being guards, it goes without saying that Jokic would be the only big man to ever average a triple double.
The numbers translate to wins too. In the 28 games Jokic has posted a triple double, the Nuggets are 26-2. That’s a 76-win pace. Over his career, he has the fourth highest winning percentage in league history when posting a triple double. The “empty stats” claim is dead in the water when his team continues to win as dominantly as they do when Nikola gets his numbers.
The counting stats are absurd in their own right, but his efficiency numbers are where things become Twilight Zone levels of odd.
Jokic has become allergic to bad shooting games. Amazingly, there have been as many 70+ point games from a single player this year (2) as games the Joker has shot below 50% from the field. Yes, that’s right 50%. The mark that’s 2.5% above league average. For reference, the two guys he’s fighting for that MVP for both have as many games (2) shooting below 30% from the field this season each.
Jokic is having one of the most efficient volume scoring seasons in NBA history, and adding “one of the” might be a disservice to him.
Here’s a list of EVERY player in league history to score 20+ PPG on 70+% true shooting percentage:
Nikola Jokic this season.
That’s It.
It should be noted that he’s almost 5 points per game over that 20+ PPG threshold, but that’s how far ahead of the low-volume, high efficiency guys he’s competing with. He’s eclipsing some of the most impressive scoring seasons of all time, and scoring isn’t even in the forefront of his offensive capabilities this year.
Don’t worry, the numbers don’t stop there — and they get a helluva lot nerdier.
The offensive dependency the Nuggets have on Big Honey is staggering.
The Nuggets have the second best offense in the league, and all the arrows point to that being due to Jokic’s time spent on the floor.
Per cleaningtheglass.com, if you remove the top scorer from every team, the Nuggets ranked 30th in offensive rating with an abysmal 105.9 points per 100 possessions. For reference, the Charlotte Hornets are the worst offensive team in the league and even they score the ball way better than the Nuggets without Jokic. The Hornets’ offense trumps the Nuggets without Jokic by over 3 points, posting a 109.3 offensive rating.
It wouldn’t be fair to post these numbers without the context of what the other MVP candidates’ teams look like under the same stipulations. The 76ers’ lineups without Embiid on the floor post a 115.4 offensive rating which ranks THIRD in the league for teams without their highest scorer. That 115.4 offensive rating would also be a better-than-average 11th best offense in the league overall.
For the Bucks, they aren’t quite as good offensively as the 76ers without their highest scorer, but still leaps and bounds better than Denver is without Jokic. Milwaukee has a 112.8 offensive rating in lineups without Giannis Antetokounpo on the floor, which is the SIXTH best offense in the league when every team removes their highest scorer. That 112.8 offensive rating is still pretty bad in relativity, as it would rank 25th in the league overall, but still almost 5 points better per 100 possessions than the Jokic-less Nuggets.
We haven’t seen a player solely impact his team’s offense since the unanimous MVP season from Steph Curry in 2016. The obvious difference between the two is that Steph led the league in scoring and, oh yeah, his team won 73 games that year. But it’s not like Jokic is doing this on a middling team. He’s been by far the best player on the number one seed in the west with a 4-game cushion over the next best team(s), and Denver has the fourth best win percentage in the league overall.
This piece was meant to highlight the laughably good offensive season Jokic has been displaying, but it wouldn’t be fair to at least touch up on the other side of the ball.
The criticisms on defense don’t come unwarranted. Despite what the slew of advanced metrics say, Jokic is far from elite at that end. He’s kicked the defense to an even-lower gear during this most recent stretch of the season, but overall hasn’t been as much of a negative as the detractors make it out to seem.
Jokic is an average defender for his position. He plays off the passing lane well and typically stays in the right spots for a team playing in a drop-back scheme. Even with this, he’s tiers behind his MVP-candidate-contemporaries in Joel Embiid and Giannis Antetokounmpo.
It’s naive to approach the game as a 50/50 split, especially in how it’s played today. Defense should never be discounted, but both aren’t seen as equals on the court anymore. There’s a reason Steph Curry and Marcus Smart aren’t seen as equal basketball players.
Nikola Jokic is closing out the 2022-2023 season with at the very least, a top 5 offensive season in NBA history. He may not end up three-peating as an MVP, and if not, it could arguably go down as the best single-season performance to not win the award.
