WHAT TOOK SO LONG TO SAVOR JOKIC, NUGGETS? BLAME THE NBA AND ESPN
The takeover by the sport’s new king and his eye-pleasing team was delayed thanks to the league and its media partner, which favored the usual stars and teams — and might pay with ugly Finals ratings
Have you heard? Nikola Jokic, a basketball savant who’s even more clever as a romantic partner, loops his wedding ring through his sneaker laces during games. It’s a tribute to his wife, high-school sweetheart Natalija, and the NBA allows it despite the safety risks of a band of gold sliding across hardwood as players run downcourt.
“Basketball is not the main thing in my life, and (it’s) probably never going to be,” said Jokic, whose wife gave birth to a little Joker, a daughter, in fall 2021. “And to be honest, I look at it because I have something at home that is more important than basketball. I knew that, but this kind of proved that I’m correct.”
So the emerging king of the sport, the transformative big man who doesn’t need hops or biceps or even shots to dominate games, cares more about his matrimonial jewelry than the championship bling he’s about to win. This further confirms Jokic and the Denver Nuggets as the Holy Hallelujah antithesis of all the people and things we don’t like — Ja Morant, spontaneous trade demands, superteam schemes, social media, load management, tanking bottom-feeders — about a league that needed a kick in the shorts and a slap in the chops. Not a scandal or reckless tweet or chest-stomping is in play here, with nary a hint of swagger or ego, which should shock the systems of superstars and mega-franchises that expect imperial rights to annual glory and attention.
And let Sir Robert Iger and Adam Silver throw a pity party if the team from the forgotten time zone isn’t “good for business,” in what is only the second Finals since 2011 not to feature LeBron James or Stephen Curry. With the league’s involvement, ESPN made its own counterproductive bed by blocking the Nuggets from regular coverage, rarely discussing them even on shoulder programming in favor of the usual sizzle and glamour — LeBron, the Warriors and the East Coast soap operas of the Celtics, 76ers and Nets. Thus, this series looms as a possible ratings crash for parent network ABC, with Denver’s Game 1 romp averaging an ugly 7.62 million viewers in overnight metrics — only 2.21 million in the 18-to-49 age demographic prized by the networks and a league angling for whopping rights-fee increases. For context, consider the Finals averaged 18 million viewers from 2013-19. The Warriors-Celtics series last June averaged 12.4 million but was extended to six games.
If the Nuggets sweep the no-show Heat, will Nielsen have to count crickets? If the series is extended, the network bean counters will inflate the numbers, I’m sure.
Regardless, the time has come to celebrate Jokic, described by no less a presiding authority than Magic Johnson as a player “changing the game of basketball right before our eyes.” His multiple dimensions as a triple-double machine — peek-a-boo passes, high-arching fallaways, pick-and-roll magic with Jamal Murray, an intellect that maximizes all the players around him, fun via fundamentals — were witnessed in the opener by an audience only vaguely familiar with his understated mastery. Through three quarters, he’d taken only five shots yet had assisted or scored on 69 of his team’s 84 points. This was an introduction to his genius on a night when he ended with the usual stat line: 27 points, 14 assists and 10 rebounds in a 104-93 victory over Miami sloggers who looked perplexed, not to mention unworthy of the moment.
“I don’t force it. I never force it, I think,” said Jokic, who does think.
“That’s the beauty of Nikola,” said Nuggets coach Michael Malone, privileged to watch the Joker Ballet for eight years. “He never tries to impose his will. The defense lets him know what to do. If they're going to give him that kind of attention, well, he's going to just pick you apart.”
“It's just fluent, beautiful basketball,” Murray said. “The ball is hopping, and we're just playing off each other. Jokic dominated, and it didn't even feel like it. Yeah, it's free flowing — and a lot of fun. We just want to win a championship.”
They play like it too, in a presentation that feels like a waterfall in a garden. In complete agreement were casual fans watching Joker and his team for the first time. Not that he cares what anyone says, an endearing quality in a league of self-promoters and knuckleheads.
“A waste of time,” he said of the latest raging hot take, which suggests he should have been named Most Valuable Player for the third straight season.
“Nothing,” he said when asked what it meant to be MVP of the Western Conference finals, a no-brainer after a sweep of the Lakers.
We are left to ask what he’ll say, if anything, after he’s the MVP of a Finals that should end quickly. Before Game 1, Jokic typically downplayed that his team should be favored in the series, despite a postseason record that now stands at 13-3. “Who said we are favorites?” he shot back. “That doesn’t … it’s not correct, I think I think we are not the favorite. I think in the Finals there is no favorites. This is going to be the hardest game of our life, and we know that.” After a crushing that was revealingly easy and methodical, he refused to budge when a reporter observed the Nuggets are a “beautiful” team to watch.
“I didn’t say that,” Jokic countered. “I said we’re playing good brand of basketball, not beautiful and not great.”
So he’s the anti-Jimmy Butler. Like it or not, Joker should know the Nuggets are about to be embraced by sporting America, if not watched in high volume, curiosity stoked as a refreshing departure from the NBA’s same-old/same-old. What’s not to like about a selfless, seamless, drama-free group that doesn’t appreciate being stonewalled for months — years, actually — by ESPN and the national media? “Even when we win, they talk about the other team,” Murray said. “It fuels us a little more and will be sweeter when we win the chip.”
They are following the no-respect lead of their coach, who said during the Lakers series: “You win Game 1 of the (West finals), and all everybody talked about was the Lakers. Let’s be honest. That was the national narrative, ‘Hey, the Lakers are fine. They’re down 1-0, but they figured something out.’ No one talked about how Nikola just had a historic performance. What he’s doing is just incredible. But the narrative wasn’t about the Nuggets. The narrative wasn’t about Nikola. The narrative was about the Lakers and their adjustments. You put that in your pipe, you smoke it, and you come back, and you know what? We’re going to go up 2-0.”
They haven’t lost since. If anyone smoked pipes at ESPN, it was only weed. Last week, Malone continued his sermon: “If anyone is still talking about the Lakers, that’s on them. They’ve gone fishing. We’re still playing.”
But now, after the Heat managed a Finals-low two free throws in a listless loss, the media have no choice but to lean into the Nuggets. Did you notice how many times Thursday night that ABC posted a graphic about Sunday night’s Game 2? Are Iger and the boys afraid the nation will forget to tune in?
If so, it’s America’s loss. The Joker and the Nuggets are an adorable treat, appearing in the Finals for the first time in the team’s 47-year NBA existence. Heretofore, we knew them for high altitude, colorful uniforms, little defense and no hardware. Now, with a Colorado-loving Serb locked in through the 2027-28 season, they’re positioned to win any number of titles. “There’s one thing we haven’t done,” Malone said. “Until we win a championship, people are going to keep saying sh— about us. So that’s what drives us, winning a championship. Getting to the Finals doesn’t do it.”
They’re going to win in five games, I say. And if the most scandalous aspect is a wedding ring on a shoelace, along with his postgame palm gesture to his daughter, well, the social media mobs will have to deal with it. Seems there’s more to basketball life than drama and handguns.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.