NBA Finals: With epic playoff run and Finals MVP, Nikola Jokić joins pantheon of game’s legends

DENVER — Every story about Nikola Jokić must, by law, feature at least one “led the league in X” stat, so let’s start here: Nikola Jokić finished right near the top of the NBA Finals in deflections. And not just on the court.

Throughout the many media availabilities that participants must endure during the championship round — an aspect of the job that they handle politely and professionally, albeit with a level of enthusiasm typically reserved for biannual dental cleanings and jury duty — Jokić fielded scores of questions about himself. What emotions coursed through him after his Denver Nuggets swept the Los Angeles Lakers to reach the Finals for the first time? How has he managed to stay grounded while ascending to international superstardom?

What sort of legacy in the game does Jokić want to leave behind? What responsibility does he feel to fans in Denver and Serbia to deliver their teams to the promised land? Where does he draw his inspiration from, and has he taken a moment to reflect on his path from Sombor to the verge of glory?

And every time, Jokić brushed those inquiries aside, diverting attention and praise to his teammates and coaches — attempting to steer the focus back toward what happened between the four lines last game and what needed to happen between them in the next game.

“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,” Jokić said after the Game 4 win that drew Denver within arm’s reach of its first NBA championship. “[But] I mean, my journey is — I don't think it's that interesting.”

While we respect the big fella’s insistence that the details of his life are quite inconsequential, this is, of course, wildly untrue.

Jokić has gone from a small town in northern Serbia with a population of about 48,000 to leaving tens of thousands slack-jawed in arenas all across the NBA every single night. From a “fat point guard” with a three-liter-a-day Coca-Cola habit to “one of the most highly conditioned players” in the best basketball league in the world, able to average more than 40 minutes per game in the NBA Finals and dominate every second of them. From a second-round draft pick selected during a Quesarito commercial to one of only 15 players ever to win multiple MVP trophies. From an unassuming reserve platooning with Jusuf Nurkić to the sun at the center of the solar system for the best team in the NBA.

And now, eight years into a career that will one day land him in the Hall of Fame, Jokić has reached the top of the mountain. After a 94-89 Game 5 win over the game but overmatched Miami Heat, the Nuggets are NBA champions, and Nikola Jokić — destroyer of defenses, breaker of brains, redefiner of dominance, self-deprecating horse lord — is your 2023 NBA Finals MVP, in a unanimous vote.

Jokić capped the Nuggets’ five-game series win with another brilliant performance, scoring 28 points on 12-for-16 shooting to go with 16 rebounds, four assists and a block in 42 minutes of work, during which Denver outscored Miami by 12 points. For the series, he averaged 30.2 points, 14 rebounds and 7.2 assists per game, shooting 58.3% from the field, 42.1% from 3-point range and 83.8% from the free-throw line — complete command of the game at every turn.

According to research conducted by Justin Kubatko of Statitudes, Jokić is just the 11th player to win multiple regular-season MVPs and Finals MVP honors. The other 10? Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Wilt Chamberlain, Tim Duncan, LeBron James, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Moses Malone and the last two Finals MVPs, Giannis Antetokounmpo and Stephen Curry. Pretty friggin’ good company. (For the record: The NBA didn’t start awarding Finals MVP until 1969, which is the only reason you don’t see the late legend Bill Russell’s name on this list — although you do see it on the award itself.)

The Finals MVP trophy is a fitting capper for what will go down as one of the greatest individual postseason runs in NBA history. As inured as we’ve become by now to Jokić’s outsized stat lines, it’s worth taking a step back and contextualizing just how remarkable his playoff performance has been.

Twenty-seven players in Stathead’s database had averaged 30 points per game in a postseason run that lasted at least 10 games. Forty-seven had averaged at least 13 rebounds per game. Twenty-four had averaged nine assists. Fourteen had posted a true shooting percentage north of .600 while using at least 30% of their teams’ offensive possessions.

How many have done all of that in a single postseason? Yep: You guessed it.

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

Jokić is the seventh player in NBA history to score more than 500 points, grab more than 200 rebounds and dish more than 100 assists in a single postseason. Up those numbers to 550-250-150 — all of which Jokić easily cleared — and we are, again, in one-of-one territory.

Jokic totaled 5.0 win shares in the 2023 playoffs — only Duncan, James and Dirk Nowitzki have ever produced more in a single postseason. Only Duncan, James and Bird have ever had a higher value over replacement player in one playoff run. Only LeBron, Kareem, MJ and Kawhi have posted a higher player efficiency rating.

That’s extraordinarily rarefied air in which Jokić finds himself, and his overwhelming individual impact produced overwhelming collective results. With Jokić and Jamal Murray at the controls, the Nuggets posted the highest offensive rating of any champion since the 1987 Lakers, per Kubatko — a point-producing juggernaut that dismantled every opponent it faced, every scheme formed against it, every adjustment fashioned mid-series in the hope of slowing it down.

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, all manner of stunts and digs, the vaunted Miami zone — all trampled beneath a two-man game forged in the fire of nearly a decade’s worth of reps, perfectly complemented by shooters, cutters and ball-movers capable of finding every crack and crevice in the coverage.

“I think it's just fluid, beautiful basketball,” said Murray, who averaged 21.4 points and 10 assists per game during his own brilliant Finals run, after Denver won Game 1. “The ball is hopping and we're just playing off each other … just making reads on the basketball court. I think that's the beauty of what this team is: We have so many different weapons and so many different looks [that] you've got to guard everybody.”

Time and again throughout these Finals, the Nuggets showcased the depth and variety of those weapons: Murray’s stellar scoring output in Games 1 and 3, rookie Christian Braun kicking in 15 off the bench in Game 3, Aaron Gordon’s monster Game 4, Bruce Brown scoring 11 of his 21 in the fourth quarter to seal a 3-1 lead. Those individuals deserve the credit for stepping to the front of the stage and shining bright under the klieg lights of the Finals. They were free to do so, in large part, because of just how terrified Miami was of the havoc that Jokić could wreak, and because of how Jokić weaponizes that fear through the on-court application of the sort of altruism that makes him so allergic to talking about himself in news conferences.

“It's really rare — it's a blessing,” Gordon said after Game 4. “It's awesome to play with these guys. These guys are so unselfish. They're so passionate about basketball, and they understand that you've got to keep energy in the ball, and if you play the right way, everything will work out the way it's supposed to. We can win. Everybody gets love when you win.”

That, as much as anything, is at the heart of what the Nuggets built in the Rockies while the eyes of the NBA-watching world were looking elsewhere: the sense that by sharing the burden and the ball, by focusing on how we score rather than how I score, and by trusting the pass and each other, you’re going to win a hell of a lot more than you lose. And that, to hear head coach Michael Malone tell it, all flows from Jokić.

“Culture is not a thing that you achieve and you cross it off your list,” Malone said at Nuggets practice Sunday, ahead of Game 5. “Culture is a thing that you have to work on each and every day, or if not, that culture is going to go away. It just so happens that the two-time MVP and a great player in Nikola kind of embodies everything. When you have a guy that has had the success that Nikola has had, being your hardest worker and being as selfless as he is and trusting as much as he does, well, that allows everybody else to kind of fall in line.”

And when everyone’s marching in lockstep, in the same direction, with the same motivation, you can go an awfully long way.

“I think [with] Nikola, it's never about looking backward,” Malone said before this series. “It's always about looking forward and challenging himself to become the best player that he can be.”

The player he became in this series, according to the trained eye of the person who’s partnered with him more closely and more often than anyone else over the last six years, is the best version there’s ever been.

“He won his first MVP. And his numbers were better the second MVP [season]. And his numbers are better now,” Murray said. “I think there's more to come, actually, from Jok. I think we haven't seen a side of Jok that we are going to see, where he can be just pure dominance — all the way, the whole game, even more than he has been.”

The journey, then, might just be getting started. Jokić probably won’t be too interested in talking about it. The rest of us, though? We’re going to be talking about him, and what he just did, for a long, long time.