‘Dude’s on another level’: How Nikola Jokic quietly became a defensive analytics darling

DRAPED IN A towel, Anthony Edwards burst into the Target Center home locker room befuddled.

The Minnesota Timberwolves had just rallied from a double-digit fourth-quarter deficit to beat the Denver Nuggets. Still, Edwards, too confused to celebrate, knew something was amiss after their Nov. 1 win. The All-Star playfully pinpointed Minnesota assistant coach Micah Nori, a former Denver staffer who worked closely with Nikola Jokic during the Nuggets superstar’s first three NBA seasons.

“I’m sorry, y’all,” Edwards said, apologizing to reporters for interrupting the scrum around Rudy Gobert‘s locker. “Hey, I was just telling Micah, how this mother—er knew the play we was runnin’?”

“We have a spy on the bench, man,” Gobert said.

Midway through the fourth quarter, coming out of a timeout, Jokic saw Edwards and Gobert line up just above the two elbows. He then gestured to his teammates exactly what the Timberwolves were running.

“Jokic knew the play, but we didn’t say anything,” said Gobert, who, in the moment, exchanged a baffled glance with Edwards before staring at Jokic in bewildered awe. “He knew the play better than us.”

Down the hall, in the visitors locker room, Jokic shrugged when confronted with the accusation. He noted how often the Nuggets had faced the Timberwolves the previous season when the teams played four regular-season games and a seven-game Western Conference semifinal series.

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Gordon’s steal leads to a flashy layup by Westbrook

Aaron Gordon steals the rock and Russell Westbrook gets the layup in transition for the Nuggets.

The three-time MVP’s basketball IQ doesn’t surprise most by now. He’s one of the best players in the world for a reason, averaging 29.7 points and 10.2 assists. But his unconventional tactics on the other end of the floor, whether it’s purposely kicking the ball or memorizing opponent’s plays, often leave players, coaches and fans in awe. And despite his obvious athletic limitations, the 6-foot-11 big has grown into a defensive analytics darling.

And in Minnesota’s locker room that night, one of Joker’s best tricks was puzzling the Wolves.

“Me and Rudy looked at each other and said, ‘How the f— do he know?'” Edwards asked, exasperation dripping from his voice. “That motherf—er cheating, bruh.” “Yeah,” Gobert said, addressing the scrum again. “We got to launch an investigation.”

AFTER BEING PICKED in the second round of the 2014 draft by the Nuggets, Jokic went to the P3 Applied Sports Science lab in Santa Barbara, California, for testing. The then-20-year-old’s athleticism results were bleak.

Most glaringly, Jokic did a standing vertical leap and only got 17 inches off the ground; the worst recording for any of the 1,000-plus NBA players the lab has ever tested. It’d be an obvious concern for any player, let alone a center who would be tasked with protecting the rim.

On top of that, when looking at rotation players who log an average of 2 miles of distance each game, Jokic ranks third-to-last this season in the NBA in terms of how often he’s running “fast,” doing so just 2.9% of the time, according to Second Spectrum. It would mark the sixth time in a seven-season span that he ranks in the NBA’s bottom 10 in speed.

And during the 2019-20 season, one year before winning his first MVP award, Jokic was the slowest player in the league.

“I’m patient because I cannot really run fast, and that’s my only option,” Jokic said then of his plodding pace.

Despite his inability to run or jump like other players, Jokic has accomplished something remarkable: The center is a perennial advanced-metrics juggernaut on defense, routinely finishing with better big-picture numbers than Gobert, a four-time Defensive Player of the Year, or future Hall of Fame defender Draymond Green.

Defensive box plus-minus, which measures a player’s box-score defensive impact and value to his team per 100 possessions, has been pointing to Jokic as the NBA’s most valuable defender for years now. He has finished No. 1 in the metric for the past three seasons and is within striking distance of doing it for a fourth.

How could that be the case, given his obvious physical limitations? What are the analytics seeing in Jokic that traditional observers can’t, even after all this time?

Those around the star say it all starts with Jokic’s impeccable recall and anticipation of opponents’ tendencies and playcalls.

“A lot of times on out-of-bounds plays, he’ll literally move you into the spot. He does it every single game. [Viewers] may not see it, and it might be subtle, but he moves you into your spot,” wing Christian Braun told ESPN. “He’s going to look at you and tell you, ‘Hey, this is what’s coming; this was their call.’ You’ll see him looking at the other coach to hear their call. He knows what’s coming and knows the best way to guard it.”

Added Nuggets forward Peyton Watson: “I haven’t seen him be wrong [when calling out a play],” he told ESPN. “Dude’s on another level intellectually with the game. … So we’ll be waiting on the day when he’s wrong.”

Jokic’s memory bank as a defender is robust, according to Nuggets assistant coach Popeye Jones. “If a team tries to go back to [the exact same out-of-bounds play] the next year, he’ll still remember it,” Jones told ESPN.

Still, calling out plays is far from Jokic’s only defensive skill. Despite his lack of speed, he has quietly been one of the NBA’s most active stoppers.

HIS WORLD-CLASS talent on the court is well known — with Jokic having won Most Valuable Player three out of the past four seasons. But over the years, Jokic has given the impression he could be good at just about any sport.

Weeks after winning Finals MVP and leading the Nuggets to the NBA title in 2023, Jokic became a horse-racing champion in his native Serbia. He has shown off his stellar QB talent by rifling a one-armed 66-foot lob — an inbound pass from the sideline, no less — that resulted in an Aaron Gordon dunk against Memphis in 2023. Plus, mostly recently nailing a half-court, one-handed buzzer-beater against the Jazz on March 28. And countless times in his career, Jokic has spun around after grabbing a board and, in one fluid motion, flung a water-polo-style pass the length of the floor to a teammate.

Early in his career, the Nuggets played far more drop coverage on defense, with Jokic often sinking into the paint for rim protection. In recent years, though, he has played much further up against pick-and-rolls — closer to the arc — as a way to impede the ball handler and force complicated passes to the roll man.

Wing players generally have a split second to decide to throw a pocket pass to their screener, who streaking behind the defense towards the basket. For defenders, there’s even less time to disrupt that pass.

But for the Joker — currently on pace to lead NBA centers in deflections (240) for a sixth straight season — a split second is plenty of time to knock a pass out of the way.

“We have him up at the level [of the screen] a lot, and when teams try to find that pass to the big, to get behind us, Nikola’s shown that he has an uncanny ability to break those passes up,” Denver coach Michael Malone said. “Hands. Feet. Whatever he’s got to use.”

And Jokic uses his feet a lot.

So frequently that players throughout the NBA have noticed. Green, when asked by ESPN to discuss Jokic’s unorthodox defense, the Golden State stalwart, already knew where the conversation was headed.

“Is it gonna be about his million kick ball [violations]?” Green asked with a laugh.

Indeed, in recent years no one in the NBA has stopped the game more by kicking the ball than Jokic. Since the start of 2020, the superstar has been whistled for a whopping 127 kicked-ball violations, between his regular-season and postseason games. In the 2022-23 season alone, Jokic logged 56 kicked balls; more than any other team did. For perspective, the league’s next-closest player, Chicago Bulls center Nikola Vucevic, has recorded just 66 kicked-ball violations total since the start of 2020.

Aside from the sheer wildness of those numbers — or the fact that Jokic is extremely balanced, having committed 67 violations with his right foot and 60 with his left — is the idea that the center has essentially found a cheat code on defense. In being able to time the plays perfectly, Jokic can effectively press pause and short-circuit the opposing team’s offense whenever he feels like it, forcing a possession to restart.

Take, for instance, a play from Game 4 of the 2023 NBA Finals, in which Jokic quickly extended his left leg into the path of a backdoor pass from Bam Adebayo to Duncan Robinson. “It’s a kick-ball violation, but it stops what probably would have been a layup,” ABC play-by-play announcer Mike Breen during the telecast. The stoppage marked Jokic’s fourth kicked ball of the contest. (The center has had as many five kicks in a game, and somehow managed to log three kicks in six minutes against Miami another time.)

Few players have had more passes disrupted by Jokic than Green, who explained the wisdom of the tactic. “What all of us are trying to do in the NBA is avoid having to face a set defense,” Green, a former Defensive Player of the Year, told ESPN. “So if you have them in a bad way, where you’ve got a clear 2-on-1, he just kicks the ball, stops the play, and it’s a side out. Guess what? That allows them to reset their defense.” In all, Green has had a total of nine passes impacted by a Jokic kicked ball since 2020.

Green said there was a time when Jokic, newer to the league still, seemed not to care about defense. But despite how otherworldly Jokic was becoming on offense, the Nuggets knew better than to take the ultimate step without him being a better defender.

“He knew that if they wanted to win at a high level and become a champion, he couldn’t be a liability. Now he’s become a strength on that side of the floor and learned how to anchor a defense,” Green said. “He literally willed himself to become better on defense.”

Undoubtedly some of the improvement stemmed from sheer experience. And a great deal can likely be attributed to him getting in better physical shape after his first few years in the league. But at a certain point, Jokic began letting his brainpower and photographic memory make up for what he lacked in footspeed or athleticism.

“[A player’s] mind isn’t limited to one end of the floor, and he’s obviously an elite thinker out there,” Thunder coach Mark Daigneault said. “He’s got instincts, and they translate to every part of his game.”

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