Nikola Jokić is already in a special room, but he enters even more exclusive territory by winning his third NBA Most Valuable Player award — and, thus, creates more responsibility and pressure in this current struggle his Denver Nuggets find themselves in.
Since the media began voting in 1980-81, there’s a handful who’ve won at least three: Larry Bird, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan and LeBron James. Overall, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has won six, Bill Russell and Jordan have five, Wilt Chamberlain and James have four, and Moses Malone, Johnson and Bird have three.
Jokić shrugs at all of the hoopla, preferring to slink away to his native land during the offseason and pretend none of this matters to him. But there’s no way someone this great has gotten this way by accident, or without being as driven as the men on the very short list of greatest players of all time.
He’s not quite yet at the stage of receiving an MVP award and looking miserable doing it, like Dirk Nowitzki was in 2007 when his Dallas Mavericks were eliminated by the Golden State Warriors in the first round in the rare 1-8 upset, but Jokić and the Nuggets are halfway there.
The Minnesota Timberwolves have Jokić on the ropes, as they’ve been built to beat the Nuggets and to wear down Jokić, who has had the two worst playoff games of his career — or at the least, since becoming that dude.
But make no mistake here, Jokić is still worthy of the award he’s receiving and just as dangerous entering Friday night’s Game 3 as he was at the start of the series. He hasn’t put up MVP numbers in the first two games of this series, as the Timberwolves have swarmed him and forced him to be an uncharacteristically sloppy version of himself, with turnovers and indecision as the main culprits.
The temptation is to say someone else is more deserving of the award. The temptation is to say Jokić is already one of two MVP winners (Magic being the other in the 1989 Finals) in the media voting era who’s been swept out of the playoffs in the same season, as was the case for Jokić in 2021, his first MVP campaign.
That temptation shouldn’t be fed this week. Jokić is facing, perhaps, the greatest challenge of his career to date. Even being swept in the conference semis by Phoenix in 2021, the Nuggets were without Jamal Murray. In 2022, when the Nuggets were beaten by the eventual champion Golden State…