The Nuggets Have Struck Gold With Nikola Jokic

With the current trend of young hybrid big men in the NBA, KAT, Embiid, and Kporzee are getting all the love. Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic is showing up fashionably late, but he is also demanding our attention

If you don’t know, now you know. The Joker is on a stat stuffing rampage, and proving to everyone around the league that he is a new school center that can do it all. The Denver Nuggets are currently the 8 seed in the West and make the playoffs if the season ended as we speak.

There is direct correlation between this, and the play of Nikola Jokic as of late.

The Serbian native is averaging 15 points, eight rebounds and three assists per game on the season. These stats are deceiving however. Early on, the Nuggets were a mess. Messing with their starting lineups, bringing guys off the bench, and trying to find the correct roles for certain players.

You can say this was a recipe for success for Jokic, because in his last 10 games he is feasting. Those stats I mentioned earlier have climbed to 23.6 points, 10.3 rebounds and 4.3 assists. Watching the Nuggets play, they make it a priority to feed the beast and run the offense through him.

What separates The Joker from mere mortals is his craftiness and insane passing skills. Check out this wizardry below.

That creature making those passes is a 6-foot-10, 250 lb center!! Every night he sets twitter on fire with a no look dime, or a one man fast (slow) break. His ball skills are not normal for someone his size, and it’s extremely entertaining.

The graph above is showing the leagues most efficient passers. Being a post player, Jokic makes a lot of passes that are within the flow of the offense, but doesn’t necessarily end in an assist. What he does do better than anyone on this graph, though, is set his teammates up for a more makeable shot.

His passes increase the chance of a teammate making their shot by 14 percent. If you take into account that the average field goal percentage of an NBA player is 45 percent; boosting that to 59 percent is huge.

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After his last five games, he has jumped LeBron and Jimmy Butler to 10th in the entire league in Player Efficiency Rating. Thank goodness for NBA League Pass. If it wasn’t for this beautiful app, no one in the world outside of Denver would know about this hidden gem.

Chances are, some people in Denver still don’t know much about him.

The NBA All-Star reserves are being announced later this week. It would be a long shot for Jokic to make it on this list with how deep and talented the west bigs are. However, his numbers are right up there with the bigs who will make the All-Star team in the Western Conference (per 36 min).

• DeMarcus Cousins -29 ppg, 10 rpg, 4 apg
• Marc Gasol -21 ppg, 6 rpg, 4 apg
• Nikola Jokic – 21 ppg, 11 rpg, 5 apg

With this recent hot streak, look for The Joker to keep stuffing the stat sheet and see an increase in minutes played per game. Mike Malone has probably figured out that when Jokic plays, the team wins. It’s that simple.

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The Denver Nuggets have finally struck gold.