Nikola Jokic played about as close to a perfect basketball game as is humanly possible on Tuesday night, leading the Denver Nuggets to a Game 5 victory and 3-2 series lead over the Minnesota Timberwolves by dropping 40 points and 13 assists on 68% shooting (15 for 22).
It served as a reminder of a couple things.
First, Jokic, who is the first player in recorded history to account for 70-plus points of offense, via scoring and assists, in a playoff game without committing a single turnover, is the best player in the world and it’s not close. There’s an argument to be made that he’s the best offensive player ever.
Second, Rudy Gobert is not the best individual defender in the world. He’s not even the best individual defender on his own team. The operative distinction here is individual defender, because after Gobert was eviscerated by Jokic there is chatter that he shouldn’t have won Defensive Player of the Year.
I can understand the reaction. If you’re the DPOY, you are, in theory, the best defender in the league, and Gobert certainly didn’t look like that as Jokic was carving him up with the conscience of a sociopath. But that’s in theory. In reality, there have only been two DPOY winners this century to come from a team that finished outside the top five in defensive rating. You have to go back to Marcus Camby in 2007 to find the last one.
DPOY is a team award wrapped in individual packaging. Which is another way of saying Gobert deserved to win his fourth DPOY this season because he anchored the best defense in the league by a wide margin, and Jokic going 8-for-9 when being guarded by Gobert on Monday (and believe me, if you didn’t see it, it looked even worse than it sounds) doesn’t change that.
Regular-season defense is about consistency over a long schedule. A Gobert defense shows up at a high level every single night when one matchup runs into the next. Besides that, Gobert has never stood on the strength of his one-on-one defense. He’s a backstop. In fact, one of the biggest reasons the Timberwolves match up…
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