If Nikola Jokic is accepted by now as a bonafide unicorn whose name belongs on any timeline charting innovation across NBA history, then his visit to Los Angeles this week should be acknowledged as a true unicorn of a stat line. Or maybe more like a goblin.
“I’ve never seen that before, and I don’t think I’ll ever see it again,” Michael Porter Jr. told Nuggets coach Michael Malone after Jokic shot 9-for-32 in a loss to the Clippers.
It was the worst shooting game of the two-time MVP’s career accounting for both volume and efficiency (28.1%). Back home two nights later, he shot 9-for-26 in another loss, including a 1-for-10 start. Jokic’s superpower for years now has been his immunity to bad games. A “bad game” for Jokic usually still ends up in the ballpark of a semi-efficient 20-point double-double. He still makes teammates better. Still impacts winning. Even in Los Angeles, he produced his 114th career triple-double.
Make no mistake, though, that was an actual bad game. Denver’s best player uncharacteristically shooting 9-for-32 was the biggest difference between a win and loss. And while it ultimately wasn’t a worrisome bad game — as Porter said, odds are Jokic never misses that many shots in one night again — it did illuminate a recent trend (in exaggerated form).
Jokic’s methods of effectiveness can shift with the ebbs and flows of a season, and lately the shift has been from near-unstoppable scorer back toward dead-eye distributor. Point in case: The 10 assists he managed to scrape together Wednesday even while taking so many shots.
The duality speaks to Jokic’s spike in responsibility lately. The Nuggets relied on him to operate their offense even more than usual as the weeks without Jamal Murray stretched on. Now that Murray (hamstring, then ankle) is back, the theme to monitor will be whether Jokic’s touches can decrease back to a more regular quantity — and regular for him is still a lot. Ideally, he’s scoring and passing at peak efficiency at the same time. Even in another MVP-caliber start to a season, the stars just haven’t fully aligned that way yet.
The dividing point in Jokic’s 2023-24 so far, statistically, is his ejection Nov. 20 in Detroit. It was around the one-month mark. It was Denver’s 14th game. Jokic had played in all of them, albeit limited minutes against the Pistons for obvious reasons. Because a first-half ejection can skew per-game stats, the best lens to use here is a per 36 minutes average.
Start with shooting volume. Through 14 games, when Jokic was already in score-first mode more than usual, he was attempting 15.45 2-point shots per 36 minutes. He was making 66.2% of those shots. As automatic as any interior finisher in the NBA.
In his next eight games after the ejection, Jokic attempted 20.81 shots inside the arc per 36 minutes and only made 51.2% of his 2-point attempts. Five of those eight were on the road, where the Nuggets are prone to lapses in offensive flow. Perhaps Jokic has felt an added responsibility to carry his team’s scoring in those games, when the Nuggets were often playing from behind. He has also grown frustrated by a lack of foul calls. Opponents have guarded him physically. Whatever the case, shooting more frequently has not paid off.
Then again, he has also averaged 11 assists per 36 minutes in this eight-game stretch, a bump from 9.5 per 36 in the first 14 games. His turnovers per 36 minutes have declined from 3.6 in the first 14 games to 2.3 the last eight. When an empty Nuggets possession ends with Jokic right now, it’s because he’s missing a shot, not coughing it up with an over-ambitious pass … even though there have actually been more opportunities for him to cough it up.
Jokic passed the ball on 18.2% of his paint touches his first 14 games; he passed on 23.9% of his paint touches in the next seven, entering Friday night’s game vs. Houston. His pass rate on post-ups also jumped from 28.4% to 46.9% between those stretches, coinciding with a drop in post-up shooting percentage (55% to 42%). For turnovers to decrease despite a notable rise in passing situations is a testament to Jokic’s pedigree as one of the all-time great play-making centers. He and Malone have acknowledged before that turnovers are an inevitable side-effect of his creativity and the type of basketball the Nuggets play. Yet twice in three games last week, Jokic registered a 30-point triple-double without committing a single turnover (ending a 56-game streak in which he had at least one turnover). No other NBA player in the last 40 years has accomplished that twice in their career.
In other words, Jokic has arguably reached a new career apex as a distributor in recent weeks, even while his 2-point shooting plummeted.
Murray came to Jokic’s defense Friday with an impassioned response to a question about the center’s poor shooting nights.
“I don’t shoot well every game,” Murray said. “Jok don’t shoot well every game. Mike don’t shoot well every game. Sometimes we don’t play defense. It can’t be just on: ‘He missed a couple floaters. Why are we down?’ No, it’s not about that. I hate when people keep saying that. Like, so what? He had a bad game. Or a bad shooting night. Whatever the hell you want to call it. He had a triple-double the other night, and you’re saying he had a bad game. I don’t know what player has a bad game after a triple-double.”
How can shooting volume and passing volume both leap so much simultaneously? That gets to the crux of this most recent chapter in Jokic’s season.
Of the Nuggets’ first 14 games, the NBA tracked individual touches in 12 of them (excluding Denver’s wins against Golden State and Chicago). When touches were tracked, Jokic averaged 107.5 per 36 minutes. In the next seven games, he averaged 118.2 touches per 36 going into the Rockets game.
“Obviously, heavy is the head that wears the crown. A lot is being asked of him every night,” Malone said. “To score, to rebound, to defend, to play-make, to be a leader, and he’s never shied away from it. That’s one thing I love about Nikola. … I’ve gotta find ways to maybe get Nikola some rest and lessen his burden, but knowing him and how tough he is, he won’t want that. He won’t even want to hear it.”
Murray’s return should spread out the priorities of opposing defenses, making life easier for Jokic as a scorer again. But the current 18-for-58 stretch has occurred with Murray in the lineup, possibly a reminder that even Jokic needs to rediscover his shooting rhythm sometimes.
“He’s doing everything he can,” Murray said. “Not every night’s gonna go your way.”
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