Nikola Jokić's Legacy Will Probably Be Fine
In the NBA, there’s always eternal failure, followed by many chances at eternal redemption
I often find myself spellbound by Brian Windhorst’s gift for effortless NBA wisdom. How does a man come up with a koan like “the problems that confront the NBA are largely about science and money”? For today’s purposes, I’m fixated on Windhorst’s proclamation that the “NBA is restorative,” from a clip I often see shared but isn’t so easily searchable. Who else could perceive this about a league with such a perpetually negative discourse?
Brian’s point was that, in the NBA, there’s always time. Even Rudy Gobert, much mocked and maligned throughout his career, manages his way back to redemption. We’ve come a long way since he personally started the Covid epidemic.
Brian didn’t mean “there’s always time” literally and absolutely. Sometimes, a tragedy will befall a career that truly ends an arc. But generally speaking, there’s often more time in a superstar’s story. It really doesn’t feel that way after a humiliating playoff failure that provokes supposed permanent criticism. I’ve got vivid memories of the aftermath from multiple LeBron James’ playoff flameouts. I remember sitting at Shan Dong restaurant in Oakland, wondering just how LeBron’s reputation would ever recover from a 2010 elimination. A year later the 2011 Finals happened, which seemed like a legacy death sentence. That was 15 years ago. LeBron James’ legacy lives, fruitfully, at the expense of Father Time.
The basketball version of, “there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out,” is less consumed as a momentary disappointment than a banishment to eternal shame. The magic of the NBA is that it’s somehow the league of a searing, “How terrible!” but also the league of, “We’ll see.” In the NFL, you don’t get as much “We’ll see.”
With that in mind, there’s an extremely negative Nikola Jokić backlash following his first round exit at the hands of the depleted Minnesota Timberwolves. It’s a whole Internet wave, as I mentioned yesterday:
The post fit perfectly into an X discourse that had grown weary of Jokić praise. Various prominent NBA media figures had heralded the Denver center as arguably history’s greatest offensive player (There’s a case for that, to be clear). Vocal fans of other players and teams had come to believe Jokić benefits from a double standard in NBA media. There was a racial component to the debate, a dash of, “What’s with all these White media nerds slobbering over this guy?” Even if taciturn Jokić isn’t exactly an obvious lightning rod, he’d become one in these spaces. The post was probably constructed to draft off that controversy.
I’m not a public Jokić Guy like others in NBA media, but I also stopped staking out positions like this. I’m largely out of the game. When you’re in the official NBA-NBA content space, you need to select MVPs and rank relative stars. This then leads to fan criticism when your stars go Casey at the Bat on you. I’ve felt the result both as fan and reporter. When I was younger, I experienced the dread of knowing my guys were going to get savaged in the Conversation. When I was part of the Conversation, I felt the shame of talking up figures who let me down, stupid as it sounds. I was a lead propagandist for Steph Curry and the 73 win Warriors. I could publicly grin and bear their humiliating 3-1 collapse but inside, I acutely felt a loss of face by proxy. And then the next season starts.
It was over for Steph Curry, similar to how it’s over for Jokić right now. We got ahead of ourselves with the hype. A reassessment is in order. Perhaps the past glory was a blip, a fluke. We can pick apart the comparison, but the sentiments are similar. Back then, the outrage was that Steph Curry was the “unanimous MVP.” Right now, the outrage is that Jokić is a 3-time-MVP, supposedly destined for a “Top 10 all time” NBA status. Now his trajectory has suffered a derailment, similar to how Steph got knocked off his 2016 pedestal. There were many questions, for many years. After the 2022 NBA Finals happened, people stopped asking.
The critics can have a point by the way.