The sight of the great man letting fly from distance, his hands throwing tall in high Larry Bird-style, immediately galvanized those in blue. Jokić calmly took the ball in hand and sank his first three-pointer of the night. Towards the end of Wednesday’s third quarter, as the Nuggets began to pull away from their opponents, it briefly seemed as if Jimmy Butler might inspire the Heat to sneak back into the game. The Nuggets have struggled with concentration throughout these finals, fading at the end of Game 1 to make the ultimate scoreline far closer than the game felt in real time, then switching off in the final quarter of Game 2 to let Miami even up the series.
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Through a tight opening quarter he was a defensive monster, controlling the boards with bulky authority and starving the Heat of second balls in the second quarter he began to take control on offense, deploying his full range of spins, hooks, fakes and dinks – off both hands – in the paint.īut it was in the second half that the true shape of this masterpiece became apparent. Whatever his team needed, Jokić was on hand to provide it, varying his output in line with the game’s fluctuations in momentum. If Game 1 of these finals was a passing clinic and Game 2 highlighted his scoring touch, then Game 3 offered a stage for Jokić to demonstrate his mastery of game management.
The staggering stats Jokić puts up, game to game, will always be the alpha of his claim to greatness, but it’s his refusal to do the things that basketball “bigs” are usually expected to – muscle up in the paint, wait for the ball to come to him, dunk – that form that claim’s omega, that make him so uniquely charming.
Instead of playing “above the rim” like someone of his immensity normally would, he operates below it he plays above and around the heads of his opponents, across their backs, through their legs, under arms raised haplessly in defense. Although he’s close to seven feet tall, his greatest skills are those more typically associated with players many inches his inferior: passing, dribbling, ball handling, court awareness. Jokić is the rare big man who plays against type. The history of the NBA is replete with examples of small men who played against type to impose themselves in the paint: Spud Webb, Muggsy Bogues, Allen Iverson. A claim for historical greatness is convincingly being assembled. The two-time MVP is clomping through these finals with the vision and improvisational sizzle of Magic, Hakeem the Dream’s size-defying touch and footwork, and Jordan’s on-court omnipresence and invincibility, his sheer weight of numbers and aura of statistical destiny. “I watched Magic because of his passing, and Hakeem because of his post moves, and Jordan because he is Jordan,” Jokic wrote in 2016, a year after joining the Denver Nuggets as a second-round draft pick. Growing up in Serbia in the early years of this century, Jokić would spend hours on YouTube watching his favorite NBA players. But most impressive was the way in which he accumulated these figures, with a freedom and variety that captured the best of his childhood heroes. Jokić’s numbers – 32 points, 21 rebounds, 10 assists – made him the first player ever to post a 30-20-10 game in the NBA finals.
As Denver tightened their grip on the finals with a coolly commanding Game 3 win in Miami on Wednesday night, a talent that once threatened to go unrewarded with the hard currency of titles has come thrillingly into mint.
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