No joke — Nikola Jokic, MVP front-runner, is the NBA’s best player: Hollinger’s Week That Was

It’s the Joker’s world, we’re just living in it.

I had a big column planned about the MVP race, but that race is over. Any lingering trace of drama vanished Saturday when Nikola Jokic led the Nuggets to a win over the Clippers, their ninth in 10 games without Jamal Murray, and one that left Denver ahead of both L.A. teams in the standings.

With potential rivals for the award dropping like flies while Jokic has played every game for Denver, the MVP feels like a fait accompli at this point. Jokic leads the NBA in PER and BPM and is second only to Julius Randle in minutes. In other words, he’s played both more effectively and more often than every other player in the league. All the other all-in-one alphabet soup ratings have him either first or close to it, and his edge in minutes over most of his rivals is massive. Joel Embiid, for instance, has played 819 minutes fewer than Jokic — nearly 20 full games.

Those minutes have been massively impactful too, as the Nuggets own the NBA’s third-best record despite having no other All-Stars on the roster. The only MVP debate this season is the fake one they have to make up for TV shows where people scream at each other. Actually, the far more interesting debate is who should come in second, but I’ll save that for another day.

Yet there is another topic underlying the MVP debate here that we need to address. This one gets at both the MVP race and the reluctance among many to anoint Jokic until far beyond the point where it became obvious he should be the winner. (Or not even then, in some cases.)

Yes, there’s a perception Jokic is sort of backing into this because so many other contenders have missed time due to injuries, but I don’t think that’s it.

Peel back the onion, and I think the real undercurrent here is a sentiment more along the lines of “really … this guy?” The idea is that Jokic can’t be the MVP, because surely this doughy, slightly goofy center in the Rockies isn’t the best player in the league.

To which I would say … You sure about that?

No, Jokic doesn’t exactly fit our idea of what “best player in the league” looks like. He’s not a perimeter player, for starters, and it’s been 21 years since a center won MVP. That center, Shaquille O’Neal, was an overwhelming physical force, but Jokic doesn’t play like that. Instead, he combines size, shooting touch and ball skills to slowly, steadily carve up opponents. “Checking Jokic is like getting your ass beat in a pillow fight,” as Crooked Media’s Jason Concepcion so aptly put it.

It also doesn’t help that he plays in the Rocky Horror Time Zone and isn’t on one of the five anointed teams that play every other game on national TV. A lot of East Coast media don’t see him much.

Finally, our emphasis on the playoffs also has increased in recent seasons, especially as some teams openly hold back key players during the regular season. Jokic has been really, really good the past two postseasons, but he hasn’t had a one-man slalom through the field as Kawhi Leonard had in 2019 or LeBron James did in (*gestures at his Basketball-Reference page*).

Nonetheless, I don’t think we can dismiss the idea out of hand. For starters, Jokic is hands-down the best passer in the league; I don’t think that’s a topic any reasonable person could debate. His peripheral vision is amazing — he’ll fire no-look crosscourt bullets just by reading the defense and not ever locking eyes on his target — and his imagination for deliveries unprecedented. His only competition in this department is history: Magic Johnson, Steve Nash, etc.

The change this season, however, is how much more aggressive and accurate The Joker has become as a scorer. This is the quiet part that isn’t getting enough attention. Jokic is shooting with Steph Curry-esque efficiency (64.8 percent true shooting!) and at a high rate (37.0 points per 100 possessions, the 10th-best rate in the league and a huge jump from his 30.8 of a year ago). In addition to his ridiculous array of shots closer to the basket, he’s also shooting 41.2 percent on 3s, a shot where he was previously average at best (Jokic made only 31.4 percent last season, for instance).

While Jokic doesn’t draw shooting fouls at the same rate as some other elite scorers (oddly, he draws heaps of non-shooting fouls, helping his team get into the bonus), it hardly matters because his skill level is so absurd. The Sombor Shuffle is the one that gets all the attention — a right-hand dribble into a fading jumper off the right foot that would get any high-school player immediately pulled from the game if they attempted it — but that’s far from the only one.

I’m not sure anyone in the league is better at nonchalantly dropping in one-footed floaters while looking like he’s just goofing around at a lunchtime run. Look at this ridiculous moonball he drops in over Rudy Gobert, for instance.

Statically, this bears out. Half of Jokic’s shots are non-rim 2s — the game’s most difficult looks — but he makes 55 percent of them, according to Cleaning the Glass.

The other thing here is that Jokic isn’t some 6-foot-4 guard. He’s huge, a 6-11 center with a wide frame, long arms and catcher’s mitts for hands, and uses that to major effect on the glass. For a high-usage player, he’s a massive threat on the offensive glass with an especially deft knack for tip-ins; among players in the top 50 in usage rate, he’s the top offensive rebounder (9.3 percent), better even than Zion Williamson.

Sum it all up, and you can’t switch against him because he mauls smalls in the post and on the glass, but you can’t double-team him because he’ll carve you up with his passing. He’s also really developed his handle, often dribbling up rebounds himself, and that lets him leave other bigs in the dust when he starts doing his sorcery on the perimeter. He’s so good with the ball, in fact, that he has nearly the same assist rate as Luka Doncic but with a massively low turnover rate.

As a result, he’s become almost an offense unto himself, a James Harden without all the dribbling. He improvs plays just by head nodding and dropping precision bounce passes into microscopic windows … or he can turn and take any player in the league on the block. The proof is in the results: Denver is third in offensive efficiency, just 0.7 points per 100 off Brooklyn’s league-leading figure, despite not exactly sending an armada of All-Stars out there alongside Jokic.

Overall, the best player in the league debate still seems very much up for grabs. As ever, the postseason will give us a much better indication of which players belong at the forefront of this discussion.

Nonetheless, I think some of the resistance to Jokic’s MVP candidacy stems from this notion that he couldn’t possibly be the league’s best player … right? We might want to rethink that assumption. The preponderance of the evidence from the regular season would say that, actually, he is.

Cap Geekery

With the season winding down, we don’t have as much cap geeking to discuss. Most teams have filled their rosters and the ones that are left are mostly just inserting veteran filler into empty roster spots for the playoffs.

However, two situations warrant mentioning:

• May 6 is the first date New Orleans can sign a player to its 15th roster spot and still stay below the luxury tax. The Pelicans recently signed 2019 draftee Didi Louzada to their 14th roster spot, with his $123,056 salary as a draft rookie counting $98,940 less than a veteran signed to the same slot.

That difference matters, because the Pelicans on May 6 could sign a veteran to a rest-of-season deal for $122,097 … and end up skirting the tax by a mere $8,651.

• Toronto’s Gary Trent Jr. sat out Sunday’s win over the Lakers with a bruised lower left leg, and with the Raptors having eight games left in their season, he represents an interesting case.

Trent will meet the “starter criteria” for his qualifying offer with either one more start or 57 more minutes played, as our intrepid Raptors writer Blake Murphy recently noted. Doing so would raise his qualifying offer and cap hold from a paltry $2.2 million to a slightly more expensive $4.7 million.

While this has no material impact on the Raptors re-signing him — Trent’s market value far exceeds that qualifying offer amount — it does somewhat impact Toronto’s cap space scenarios for this offseason. The Raptors can generate roughly $23 million in space by waiving the non-guaranteed deals of Aron Baynes, Rodney Hood and several fringe rotation players but would have $2.5 million less if Trent returns to action for these final seven games.

Currently holding the league’s eighth-worst record but sitting 2.5 games out of the play-in and still having a game left against the 10th-place Wizards, the Raptors are in an interesting spot. No, the cap implications aren’t worth sitting Trent out, especially after Sunday’s win in L.A. But if they drop a few games this week and Trent isn’t back yet, it will become a more interesting conversation.

Rookie of the Week: Malachi Flynn, Toronto

(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best rookie of the week. Just the one that I’ve been watching.)

The 29th player selected in the 2020 draft, Flynn has seen a lot more court time in the wake of a slew of injuries to the Raptors backcourt. He hardly played the first half of the season, but after passing his initial test — a six-game stint in the G League bubble, where he was one of the best players — Flynn has played every game since March 19 and started nine of them.

Two things stand out about Flynn: His defense is clearly NBA caliber and his offense is very much a work in progress.

Let’s start with the D. Flynn’s game tape from San Diego State showed him as a smart, active, fundamentally solid defender who could make up for a lack of size (6-1) and elite physical tools. Thus far, that’s been the case at the NBA level.

It’s the offensive side where Flynn has had more troubles. While he can make basic reads out of the pick-and-roll and has proven pretty adept at throwing pocket passes, he lacks the burst to punish switches and consistently get to the rim. Thus, even though he has a good mid-range pull-up game, he’s swimming against a mathematical rip tide. Taking only 11 percent of your shots at the rim is a tough way to live.

Additionally, his perimeter game is an area that still needs some work. Flynn is only at 31.4 percent from 3 after making 36.4 percent as a collegian. Getting the shot off at all can be a problem. He’s not big and has a fairly slow release off the catch, so launching over a closeout can be a problem. Here, for instance, a seemingly wide-open 3 is altered by JaMychal Green’s contest:

Flynn’s size also can get him in trouble on the sidelines; he has a lot of trouble getting the ball out of traps from those spots on the court.

Overall, the makings of a plus backup are here. Rookie point guards historically have taken a beating, and the progress they make in Year 2 is usually the better market of their career trajectory. Additionally, Flynn’s defense is enough to keep him on the court even through some offensive struggles.

To have real plus value as a third guard, however, Flynn needs to either get to the cup more consistently or demonstrate a more viable threat from distance. Right now, averaging just 17.2 points per 100 on 47.8 percent true shooting, there just isn’t enough offensive spark.

Prospect of the Week: Filip Petrusev, C, Mega Bemax

(Note: This section won’t necessarily profile the best prospect of the week. Just the one that I’ve been watching.)

Last week I wrote about the five international players who I thought warranted a first-round grade in the upcoming draft, but one player I didn’t mention is one familiar to most American fans: Filip Petrusev, who starred for Gonzaga in 2019-20 before signing in Serbia after the season. In an odd quirk, he was not draft-eligible last year but is for this year’s draft.

So what’s he been up to? Expanding his game, as it turns out. Strictly a low-post beast for the Zags, Petrusev hit 30 of his 69 3-point attempts (43.5 percent) this season for Mega, whose Adriatic League season just ended. (Still to come: a brief May-June season in the Serbian League.) While this is a low enough volume to be skeptical, his free-throw number also offers encouragement: Petrusev hit 73.9 percent this season, up from 65.5 percent his final season at Gonzaga. Look at this release, for instance, when a defender drops a half-step off him. This looks repeatable:

But there are still concerns. Petrusev has been a middling rebounder in the Adriatic League (15.3 percent) and a low-impact defender both at Gonzaga and with Mega. While he does a lot of damage inside offensively, he’s light, especially in his lower body, and struggles to contain physical fives. Additionally, doubts remain about his feet on the perimeter. While not quite in Luka Garza’s territory, he projects as a minus defender overall.

With all that said, Petrusev checks my biggest box for internationals — playing effectively in a good league. He won the Adriatic League’s MVP award as a 21-year-old. His budding perimeter skill needs to add some more passing and playmaking to give him plus-outcomes at the NBA level, but right now, he projects as a potential backup who could add enough on offense to make up what he subtracts on defense. That’s not a first-rounder in my book, especially as the league devalues centers, but could make him quite attractive at points in the early- to mid-second round.

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(Photo: David Zalubowski / Associated Press)