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From a skeptic's perch, Nikola Jokic was a prime candidate for fraudulence as springtime. His youth, his physical floamy, the unprecedented weirdness of his game, his occasional dress of going passive when he should have gotten more shots up, his leadership of a No. 2 seeded Nuggets squad that never quite felt like the second-best team in the West-these were all reasons for suspicion among believers and nonbelievers alike. Was this really real? Sometimes even Jokic's fellow players seemed to detect a whiff of gimmickry come at him with special fervor.
Jokic's Posts: 24.9 points, 11.8 rebounds, 8.8 assists, and 1.5 steals a night. That's better than his regular season averages on every count. As for the shooting, he's gone 50 percent from the floor, 37 percent from three, and 91 percent from the line, with 60 percent true shooting overall, unimpeachable across the board. And Denver's doughy hero has maintained a 6.3 net rating even after that tight seven-game first-round series.
Surveying his last three box scores is something of a trip: 43 points, 12 rebounds, 9 assists in Game 6 as San Antonio shot the lights out; 21-15-10 in Game 7 to finally bury them; 37-9-6 in Game 1 versus Portland on Monday night. The games took on higher stakes, and the big brioche did not collapse; he grew even stronger. To make matters as clear as possible: On a night that featured a highly efficient 39-point Lillard eruption lady, Nikola Jokic still remained the best player on the floor.
Granted, when questions are asked about Jokic's postseason viability, these are not quite the tests that critics had in mind. San Antonio was not a good defense, and it still took Denver perilously long to get their offensive going going; perhaps only one quarter of an unconscious Jamal Murray separated them from an untimely exit. Portland is not a good defense, certainly with Jusuf Nurkic on crutches and Enes Kanter filling the void. Jokic was going to pivot and duck and dime his way past Kanter anyway; Jokic-Murray two-man game out in space. Now that Kanter is wincing through his minutes, the Blazers seem to be thinning out where Denver is most capable of exploiting them. There's an unsettling amount of Leonard Meyers and Zach Collins on the monitors. In fact, this depleted roster might be instilling a little too much self-confidence in the soft god:
I am. He's going to continue to embarrass anyone Portland puts on the floor. There are structural reasons to believe that they can not maintain the same postseason value as perimeter players who initiate the offense. But Nikola Jokic, in the style and in the approach: a one-stop shop for team offense, who can reliably create good shots for himself and everyone around him, versatile enough to adapt to new conditions each round . If he leads Denver past Portland and puts up a respectable fight in the West finals, the only Nikola Jokic question that should remain is where it belongs to the NBA.
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