On a Nuggets team with many players boasting rising profiles, second-year center Nikola Jokić was the shiniest of them all.
And his season gleamed.
“Nikola has been the centerpiece of the success we’ve had this year,” Nuggets general manager Tim Connelly said. “You don’t see any centers with the playmaking ability he has. Knowing that that’s unique and knowing that we’ve had sustained success for several months – I don’t think that it’s flukish – you can say ‘Okay, we’ve established that. Now, how do we build around that?’”
These are well-traveled numbers, but they bear repeating.
Jokić averaged 16.7 points, 9.8 rebounds and 4.9 assists. All were massive improvements over his rookie season, which was a smash-success itself, ending in an All-Rookie first-team nod. His field goal percentage? Better than the year before. His free throw percentage? Better. Jokić had 23 more double doubles than his rookie season and recorded the first six triple doubles of his career.
His best individual month was January. In that month, 11 games, Jokić averaged 23.9 points, 11.1 rebounds, 4.9 assists, 1.4 blocks and 1.1 steals. Jokić finished the season as a leading candidate for the NBA’s Most Improved Player award, and the player the team knows it will build around for the future.
Yet, Jokić isn’t sitting on success. He’s already back working with Nuggets strength coach Steve Hess, a little over two weeks since the end of the season, getting a head start on his top priority for improvement in the offseason.
“My body,” Jokić said. “If I get stronger it’s going to be easier for me to play. My 3-point percentage is low, but I think I just need to work on that. Pretty much a little bit of everything, just to get better in everything.”
OFFENSE: If Jokić gets any better on offense, he’ll be arguably the scariest up-and-coming player in the NBA.
These five actions made up 74.2 percent of everything he did offensively – post-ups, pick-and-rolls as the roll man, cuts, offensive rebounds/putbacks, and transition.
Jokić averaged over a point per possession in all of them. That’s rarified air occupied by the game’s biggest stars, but to put this in perspective, not even James Harden, Kawhi Leonard, Russell Westbrook or LeBron James averaged over a point per possession on their top five actions. Jokić did.
In all of those but spot-up shots, Jokić shot at least 54 percent. He was a sizzling 73 percent on cuts. He was as efficient and reliable an offensive player as there was in the entire NBA.
The Nuggets primarily used him on the block and at the elbows. That allowed him to always be a threat, turning and hoisting a midrange jump shot – sometimes stretching out to the 3-point line where he knocked down 32 percent of those. Or using quickness and guile to get to the rim and finish in the paint with either hand. Jokić was automatic in both the midrange and the paint, shooting 51.9 percent in midrange shots, and 66 percent in the paint and restricted areas combined.
Scoring, however, was just part of his overall impact. Jokić was as good a decision-maker as there was on the team, and the Nuggets ran a big chunk of their offense through him because the outcome almost always resulted in points. When Jokić’s total offensive possessions plus assists are added in, his time on the court resulted in 1.382 points per possession. Among players with at least 1,000 possessions plus assists, that ranked Jokić 11th in the NBA. He was deadly all around.
His biggest percentage of turnovers came in transition. Most of those were high misses on hit-ahead passes. Jokic was also susceptible to lost ball turnovers when his dribble was pressured and when the court got crunched up below the free throw line where more hands were swiping at him. He did lead the Nuggets in turnovers (171), but he was also one of just four players with an assist-to-turnover ratio better than two (2.10), per Synergy stats.
DEFENSE. If Jokić only needs detail items to improve offensively, his defense continues to be work in progress. Opposing teams repeatedly put Jokic in pick-and-roll situations (58.2 percent of the time), and the Nuggets almost always had him dropping back into the paint instead of hedging on the screen in order to ensure the ball-handler did not get around him and to the rim.
The net effect of it was Jokić was always far away from ball-handlers that chose to rise up and shoot either behind the screen or in the midrange soon after they turned the corner. So he was constantly forced to close out to players, rarely getting there in time to get a real hand up to contest the shot. Jokić lunged and more or less had to hope they missed the shot. There is no easy fix to this for the Nuggets, but working on his quickness is one of the places they will start.
Jokić was a good post defender. Opponents only shot 40.7 percent against him in those situations. Length was the key there. And Jokić wants to get stronger, so it stands to reason that he’ll be good in that area again next season.