Mark Kiszla: NBA has new book on how to beat Nuggets and Nikola Jokic. It’s title? Muck him up
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Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, left, drives to the net as Sacramento Kings guard Keon Ellis defends in the first half of Wednesday night’s game.
The NBA has a new book on Nuggets center Nikola Jokic, and it not only weighs more than the old Encyclopedia Britannica, the league now throws every volume at him every night.
“I told the fellas at halftime: ‘Get used to this. We’re going to see this for the next 20 games,’ ” coach Michael Malone said Wednesday, after Denver escaped with a too-gritty-to-be-pretty 116-110 victory against Sacramento.
“Teams are not guarding anybody not named No. 15, Nikola Jokic. You can take it personally, but it’s going to happen. How do we react to that?”
In the stack of modern analytics that measures everything from effective field-goal percentage to usage rate, and with all those statistics suggesting that no pro basketball player has ever been more consistently spectacular, one big number gets overlooked with Joker.
On a tender, puffy left ankle he obviously dragged up down the court in Ball Arena, Jokic played his 2,000 minute of this NBA campaign against the Kings. In his 10th season, the three-time MVP has never played more than the 36.1 minutes per game he’s averaging now.
“He’s not at 100 percent,” Malone said. “Availability is one of the most important stats in this business, and his availability is among the greatest players that play this game. His availability is through the roof.”
Jokic will almost certainly finish this season ranked among the top 12 in playing time. He’s an ironman in an era of load management. Not too shabby for a guy that some hoops pundits still ignorantly regard as unathletic.
“It’s not just the minutes, he plays. But think about what he shoulders every night that’s in those minutes,” Malone said. “He’s the anchor and centerpiece of our defense, which he doesn’t get enough credit for. He’s a guy that we play through (offensively). He’s got to score for us, he’s got to play-make for us, he’s got to rebound for us, he’s got to make everybody around him better.”
Jokic hauled down 15 rebounds and chipped in 22 points, but the way the Kings harassed him to cut down his normally uncanny court vision showed up with an uncommon seven turnovers.
This was one of those nights in the NBA where pride matters as much as talent. From the opening tip, Denver had no jump, looking too pooped to pop a shot, much less guard anybody.
After Christian Braun hit a long jumper to put the Nuggets ahead 3-2 only 50 seconds into the first quarter, they did not lead again until Zeke Nnaji hit a three-point shot from the top of the key to give them a 96-95 advantage with 8:17 remaining in the final period.
Led by a late scoring outburst by Russell Westbrook, who led the Nuggets with 25 points, Denver secured an ugly victory at home by outscoring Sacramento 32-17 during the 12 minutes before the final buzzer.
“Hell of a win,” Malone said.
“As I was walking off the court tonight, somebody said: ‘We’ll take it.’ You’re damn right we’ll take it.”
Denver now owns a thoroughly unremarkable 15-16 record against foes playing at least .500 basketball. During recent losses to the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics, two teams the Nuggets might well have to beat in the playoffs in order to hoist the championship trophy in June, it has become blatantly clear that rival coaches disrespect Denver’s ability to shoot from beyond the three-point arc or even consistently nail mid-range jumpers under duress.
The strategy is about as subtle as how the Lilliputians took down Gulliver back in the day. Teams are not only swarming Jokic with two and sometimes three defenders, they’re stinging him, scratching and clawing the Nuggets center, unashamed to draw blood on his arms in a cynical attempt to rattle his composure.
Malone was asked if refs tend to turn a blind eye when smaller defenders treat Jokic like a punching bag.
“Next question,” replied Malone, biting his tongue to avoid a fine from the league office. “I appreciate the question, I really do. There are so many things I want to say. If you guys want to start a GoFundMe …”
Nobody on the planet is capable of turning basketball into a pure art form the way Joker can.
But there’s a new book on how to beat the Nuggets:
Muck him up.
How well Jokic and his teammates deal with this dirty dancing will determine how long they survive and advance in the NBA playoffs.
The Nuggets’ coach and his generational star, who spent much of Wednesday’s win over Sacramento frustrated with the officiating, said a lot by…
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JJ Redick Invented A New Way To Defend Nikola Jokic, And It’s Working
3:52 PM EST on March 6, 2025
Did you watch Kings–Nuggets last night? So did Nikola Jokic. The three-time MVP had one of his worst games of the season against the mediocre and shorthanded Kings, laboring to 22 points and 15 rebounds with seven turnovers and a relatively ghastly minus-seven. Jokic has been struggling a bit by his incredible standards since the all-star break, which is mostly due to opposing coaches borrowing a hilarious stratagem rolled out by Lakers coach JJ Redick in L.A.’s impressive blowout win over Denver two weeks ago. The scheme is simple: Deny Jokic the ball, at any cost, compromising every other part of your defense if you have to. The scheme runs counter to almost every modern maxim of defense, yet it’s working.
In practice, here’s what it looked like against Sacramento. Jake LaRavia’s only job in the clip below is to essentially box Jokic out, while Markelle Fultz and DeMar DeRozan give about 10 feet of space to Peyton Watson and Russell Westbrook in order to be able to double Jokic the second he gets the ball. You hear maxims like “Force the rest of the team to beat you!” all the time, but rarely do you see defenses contort themselves like this. The Kings keep all five guys within a foot of the paint for the duration of the play, and Westbrook was kind enough to give them what they wanted by running into a poorly considered midrange jumper.
When Jokic does get the ball, helpers stay glued to the key, prepared to spring double- and even triple-teams on him. They collapse into the paint to prevent him from shooting the easy little flip shots and half hooks that he kills most defenders with, take away the quick interior passes to the dunker spot that generate easy points, and completely cede the three-point line. The Nuggets shoot the third-best percentage in the league from three, but they take the fewest threes per game. That’s mostly a function of how effective Jokic is at generating shots at the rim.
This strategy is a wild overcorrection aimed at taking away the Nuggets’ best offense, and it’s worked pretty well for the three teams that have dedicated themselves to it. Look at how much pressure Jokic faces here, with every Lakers defender turned to face him.
This is an extension of the previous accepted best practice for guarding Jokic: with a power forward, leaving the center to roam and be prepared to rotate in on Jokic if he commits to a drive. Redick talked about this very scheme and its potential pitfalls with his now-colleague LeBron James on their podcast last season. But when the Nuggets and Lakers met two weeks ago, Redick treated the matchup like a postseason game and extended the scheme to ridiculous lengths. Denver was one spot ahead of L.A. in the standings and had won 13 of their last 14 meetings. The Lakers were also newly center-less, which made any sort of conventional coverage difficult. Denver was not ready for Redick’s plan, and Jokic shot 2-for-7 in the game.
Boston ran a version of this on Sunday and it worked again, limiting Jokic to 20 points and zero free-throw attempts. The Kings led most of Wednesday night’s game until their offense sputtered late and the Nuggets took 13 trips to the line in the fourth quarter. If the Nuggets had initially concluded that Redick’s anti-Jokic scheme was only something that top-level opponents could trouble them with, last night’s game brought a much more grim reality into focus: If the Sacramento Kings can fuck up Denver’s offense this badly, then any NBA team can do it.
The Redick scheme has an extremely obvious weakness, which is that it cedes huge pastures of space to every other Denver player. The Nuggets’ offense is based around Jokic, and the team does not seem quite prepared either to find ways to counter this scheme or to accept the gambit and play through the other four guys and the huge advantage they’ll have.
Denver head coach Michael Malone, whose answer to every scheme question comes back to playing better defense, said the way to counter the Redick scheme was to play better defense. He’s right, to a degree. It is harder for opponents to set up five guys in the paint if the Nuggets are running off misses and turnovers, and Denver does rely to a certain degree on their pace, the fifth-highest in the NBA. But while simply getting more stops might work in the regular season against most opponents, that’s not a workable strategy in the playoffs.
The thing that makes the Redick plan so fascinating is that it’s such a gamble: If the Nuggets were prepared to live with such a shot selection, their good shooters like Michael Porter Jr. and Jamal Murray, who has been great lately, could expect to take like 12 open threes per game. The Nuggets could also relocate Jokic out of the paint and run more traditional pick-and-roll stuff to get him the ball on the move, which they do in crunch time anyway. There are solutions, is my point, and though changing up your offensive identity in March is annoying, Denver has to take the opportunity now, before the Western Conference’s good defenses behead them in the playoffs.
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