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Nikola Jokic just won his third MVP award, and the Nuggets need him to play like it vs. Timberwolves
On Wednesday evening, Denver Nuggets superstar Nikola Jokic was awarded the NBA's Most Valuable Player Award. On Friday, he better start playing like it.
His Nuggets are down 2-0 to the upstart Minnesota Timberwolves, having lost its first two games at home. Anthony Edwards has far and away looked like the best player in this series -- and perhaps of any postseason series so far. All while Jokic, the cool, celebrated, can't-be-troubled-to-worry big man has looked more demoralized than dominant.
Already, the Jokic-isn't-as-good-as-they-say silliness has cropped back up. He is that good. He does qualify as a rising all-time great. He worthily won a third MVP award on Wednesday night -- I voted for him -- after an absolutely stellar season. And he will certainly fall into that weird trap that sometimes arrives this time of the year when the NBA calendar often offers up an MVP award just as its winner struggles to live up to such lofty bona fides in the playoffs.
Last season, Joel Embiid brought home the hardware. And promptly disappeared at the end of the second round of the playoffs as his Sixers surrendered a 3-2 series lead to the Boston Celtics. Jokic himself won back-to-back MVPs while, in those postseasons, saw himself swept out of the second round and then bounced a year later in the first.
James Harden, Russell Westbrook and others have similarly been awarded this prize at about the time they were exiting the playoffs, the shine of their season stained by the bright lights of a playoff exit.
Such is how things go -- the more you're celebrated, the more criticism tends to find you. Fine. Fair enough. And perhaps an expectation that the Nuggets were going to waltz to the NBA Finals -- from most of us and, by their dazed looks, the Nuggets themselves -- was much too simplistic and optimistic a reading of the Western Conference.
But to go out like this, overwhelmed and outplayed and physically dominated against a suddenly rising star in Edwards and a historically inept organization like the Timberwolves?
At least put up some fight, Denver.
Especially, Joker, as the newly minted MVP.
It's not as if Jokic has soared while his team has let him down, like, say, LeBron James in the 2015 NBA Finals. Jokic has not covered himself in glory in this series at the exact time his team needs a leader to show his true value.
The Minnesota Timberwolves were designed by team president Tim Connelly to beat the Denver Nuggets team that, before this gig, Connelly himself also largely crafted, when he ran basketball operations there. That plan has worked. The length of Rudy Gobert, who missed Game 2, Karl-Anthony Towns, Naz Reid and the other members of the T-Wolves No. 1-ranked defense have utterly confounded Jokic and his teammates.
In Game 1, Jokic did go for 32 points, eight rebounds and nine assists. But he had to labor to get there, shooting just 11-of-25 with seven turnovers. The Nuggets lost, and in Game 2 the widely expected Joker-steps-up-and-sets-things-right performance did not materialize. He went just 5-for-13 for 16 points, and his team lost by a whopping 26 points.
