How Nikola Jokic became the favorite of defensive analysis?
From violations of kicking the ball to memorizing plays, Nikola Jokic has raised his intellectual coefficient to become one of the best defenders in the League.
WRAPPED UP IN a towel, Anthony Edwards He broke into the local wood -donfted centers locker room.
The Minnesota Timberwolves They had just traced a two -digit disadvantage in the last quarter to overcome the Denver Nuggets. Even so, Edwards, too confused to celebrate, knew that something was wrong after November 1. The All-Star pointed out to the assistant coach of Minnesota, Micah Nori, a former member of Denver staff who worked closely with Nikola Jokic During the first three seasons of the nuggets superstar in the NBA.
“Sorry,” said Edwards, apologizing to journalists for interrupting the melé around the locker of Rudy Gobert. “Hey, I was telling Micah how this bastard knew the play we were doing.”
“We have a spy in the bench, uncle,” Gobert said. In the middle of the last quarter, when leaving a dead time, Jokic saw Edwards and Gobert aligned just above the elbows. Then he told his teammates exactly what the Timberwolves were executing.
“Jokic knew the play, but we didn’t say anything,” said Gobert, who, at that time, exchanged a look of confusion with Edwards before looking at Jokic with amazement and confusion. “He knew the play better than us.”
At the end of the hall, in the visiting costumes, Jokic shrugged when he was confronted with the accusation. He remembered the frequency with which the Nuggets had faced the Timberwolves the previous season, when the teams played four regular season games and a series of semifinals of the West Conference of Seven games.
The intellectual coefficient of three times MVP In basketball no longer surprises the majority. It is one of the best players in the world for something, with an average of 29.7 points and 10.2 assists. But their unconventional tactics on the court, either kicking the ball on purpose or memorizing the rival’s plays, usually stunned players, coaches and fans. And despite its obvious athletic limitations, this two -meter giant has become an idol of defensive analysis.
And in the Minnesota costume that night, one of the best tricks of the Joker was to baffle the Wolves.
“Rudy and I looked at each other and said: ‘How the hell knows it?'” Edwards asked, with an exasperated voice. “It’s cheating, uncle.” “Yes,” Gobert said, heading again. “We have to open an investigation.”
After being Selected in the second round of the 2014 draft by the Nuggets, Jokic went to the P3 Sports Science Laboratory in Santa Barbara, California, to undergo testing. The athletics results of the then 20 -year -old young man were discouraging.
The most notorious thing was that Jokic made a vertical jump from stop and only rose 43 centimeters; The worst record for any of the more than 1000 NBA players that the laboratory has evaluated. It would be an obvious concern for any player, and even more for a pivot in charge of protecting the hoop.
In addition, when observing the rotation players who record an average of 3 kilometers per game, Jokic occupies the penultimate place this season in the NBA in terms of the frequency with which he runs “fast”, making it only 2.9 % of the time, according to Second Spectrum. It would be the sixth time in seven seasons that are among the 10 worst NBA players in speed. And during the 2019-20 season, a year before winning his first prize for the most valuable player (MVP), Jokic was the slowest player in the League.
“I am patient because I can’t run fast, and that is my only option,” Jokic said then about his slow rhythm.
Despite his inability to run or jump like other players, Jokic has achieved something remarkable: the pivot is an eternal expert in advanced metrics in defense, routinely ending with better general statistics than Gobert, four times defensive player of the yearor the future defender of the Hall of Fame Draymond Green.
The defensive Plus-minute box, which measures the defensive impact of a player on the score of the box and the value for his team for every 100 possessions, has pointed to Jokic as the most valuable defender of the NBA for years. It has finished number one in the metric during the last three seasons and is about to achieve it per fourth.
How could it be so, given your obvious physical limitations? What do you see the analysis in Jokic that traditional observers cannot see, even after all this time?
Those who surround the star say that everything begins with Jokic’s impeccable capacity to remember and anticipate the trends and plays of the opponents. “Many times, in off -band plays, it literally moves to your site. He does it in all matches. (The spectators) do not see it, and it may be subtle, but it moves you to your site,” said Eaver Christian Braun to Espn. “He will look at you and tell you: ‘Hey, this is what is coming; this was his decision.’ You will see it looking at the other coach to listen to his decision. He knows what is coming and knows the best way to defend him.”
The Nuggets eaves, Peyton Watson, added: “I have never seen it wrong (when asking for a play),” he told AM850. “It is intellectually speaking to another level … so we will be waiting for the day you are wrong.”
Jokic’s memory as a defender is very solid, according to Nuggets assistant coach Popeye Jones. “If a team tries to repeat the same off -band play next year, he will remember,” Jones told AM850.
Even so, predicting plays is not Jokic’s only defensive ability. Despite its lack of speed, it has been discreetly one of the most active defenders of the NBA.
Your talent World class on the court is well known, since Jokic has won the most valuable player award in three of the last four seasons. But over the years, Jokic has given the impression that it could be good in almost any sport.
Weeks after winning the MVP of the finals and bringing Nuggets to the NBA title in 2023, Jokic became horsepower champion in his native Serbian. He has demonstrated his stellar talent as quarterback by launching a high 20 -meter pass with a single arm (a pass from the band, nothing less) that resulted in a dump of Aaron Gordon Against Memphis in 2023. In addition, recently, he nailed a basket to one hand on the horn against jazz on March 28. And innumerable times in his career, Jokic has turned after grabbing a table and, with a fluid movement, has released a water polo pass along the court to a partner.
At the beginning of their career, the Nuggets played with much more defensive coverage, with Jokic often sinking into the paint to protect the hoop. However, in recent years, he has played much higher against the pick-And -rols, closer to the arch, as a way of hindering the player with the ball and forcing complicated passes to the player with the roll. The eaves generally have a second fraction to decide to launch a short pass to their blocker, who runs after the defense towards the basket. For defenders, there is even less time to interrupt that pass.
But for the Joker, who is currently on his way to leading the NBA pivots in deviations (240) for the sixth consecutive season, a fraction of second is enough time to divert a pass.
“We have it up to the blockade many times, and when the teams try to find that pass to the pivot, to get behind us, Nikola has demonstrated an amazing ability to divert those passes,” said Denver coach Michael Malone. “Hands. Feet. Whatever you have on hand.”
And Jokic uses his feet a lot.
So often that players from all over the NBA have noticed it. Green, when AM850 asked him to talk about Jokic’s unconventional defense, Golden State’s unconditional, he already knew where the conversation was directed.
“Will it be your million kick infractions?” Green asked with laughter.
In fact, in recent years, no one in the NBA has stopped the game more times kicking the ball than Jokic. Since the beginning of 2020, the superstar has been sanctioned with the impressive amount of 127 kick violations, among its regular and postseason season games. Only in the 2022-23 season, Jokic recorded 56 kicks; more than any other team. To put it in perspective, the next closest player in the league, the pivot of the Chicago Bulls, Nikola Vucevichas registered only 66 ball offenses kicked since the beginning of 2020.
In addition to the incredible number of numbers (or the fact that Jokic is extremely balanced, having committed 67 infractions with the right foot and 60 with the left), there is the idea that the pivot has found a trick in the defense. By timing the plays perfectly, Jokic can pause the game and short -circuit the attack of the opposing team when he felt, forcing the restart of possession.
Let’s take, for example, a play of the fourth game of the NBA finals of 2023, in which Jokic quickly extended his left leg to intercept a Bam Adebayo Bamdoor pass to Duncan Robinson. “It is a rape of kicking the ball, but it stops what would probably have been a tray,” said Mike Breen, ABC commentator, during the transmission. The arrest marked the fourth ball kicked by Jokic in the match. (The pivot has had five kicks in a game, and somehow managed to register three kicks in six minutes against Miami on another occasion).
Few players have suffered more passes interrupted by Jokic than Green, who explained the wisdom of tactics. “What we all try to do in the NBA is to avoid having to face a prepared defense,” said Green, former defensive player of the year, to AM850. “So if you have them in a bad situation, where you have a clear 2 against 1, simply kick the ball, stop the play and it is a side out. Do they guess what? That allows them to restore their defense.” In total, Green has had a total of nine passes impacted by a ball kicked by Jokic since 2020.
Green commented that there was a time when Jokic, even newer in the league, seemed not to worry about the defense. But despite how exceptional Jokic was becoming in attack, the Nuggets knew that they should not take the final step without him improving in defense.
“I knew that if they wanted to win at a high level and become champions, it could not be a ballast. It has now become a fortress on that side of the court and has learned to be the anchor of the defense,” Green said. “He literally struggled to improve in defense.”
Without a doubt, part of the improvement was due to experience. And much is probably due to his best physical form after his first years in the League. But at one point, Jokic began to let his intellectual capacity and photographic memory compensate for his deficiencies in speed or athletics. “A player’s mind is not limited to one end of the court, and is obviously an elite thinker,” said Thunder coach Mark Daigneault. “He has instincts, and they move to every aspect of his game.”
