Fresh off its championship season, Denver’s proving that it still owns the league.
Even against a team as mighty as the Boston Celtics, with their superior length and prodigious talent, Nikola Jokić is simply too much. Play him straight up, as the Celtics did for most of Jokić’s 39 minutes on Thursday night, and he will feast. He will bulldoze Kristaps Porziņģis and float jumpers over Jrue Holiday. Send doubles, as Boston did down the stretch of a thrilling 115–109 Denver Nuggets win, and he will carve you up. Twice in the final five minutes the Celtics thought they had Jokić pinned down. Twice Jokić found the slimmest of seams to deliver passes for easy twos.
“Jokić,” said Jaylen Brown, “is just a monster down there.”
It has been an extraordinary season in Boston. The Celtics have the best record, the best point differential and the best offensive rating the NBA has seen in years. Yet two of the 14 blemishes on Boston’s resume were delivered by Denver, which handed the Celtics their first loss on their home floor in January and extended Boston’s losing streak to two games with a win Thursday. It was Denver’s seventh victory since the All-Star break, and a firm reminder that the road to a championship still runs through the Rockies.
The NBA regular season is entering its final days and, yes, the Nuggets are once again a force. Injuries slowed Denver early in the season. Maybe a touch of a championship hangover, too. But the Nuggets have lost once since mid-February. The closer this team gets to the postseason, the better they become. They are a volcano, timed perfectly for a mid-April eruption.
In Boston, Denver faced a true peer. The Celtics were coming off a shocking loss in Cleveland Tuesday, but they had won 11 straight before that. And as good as the Nuggets starting five is, Boston can claim one that might be better. The NBA is understandably proud of the league-wide parity it has achieved this season. Still, in Boston and Denver, there remain two elites.
Both teams' stars threw haymakers in the first quarter. Jayson Tatum scored eight points. Tatum’s MVP candidacy has been on the rise as of late, thanks to his self-promotion and the understandable idea that the best player on the NBA’s best team deserves consideration. Tatum was 3–5 from the field in the first 12 minutes, connecting on both of his threes.
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Jokić, though, answered. He always answers. Jokić had seven points in the first quarter. He added 13 in the second. His halftime stat line—20 points, six rebounds, five assists—was outstanding. When Tatum made shots, Jokić answered. When Brown got hot, Jokić did, too. He made six of his nine shots in the first half, plus all eight of his free throws.
In the second half, the game tightened. Denver held an eight-point lead entering the third quarter. A pair of Porziņģis threes whittled that lead to two. The Nuggets hit back with Kentavious Caldwell-Pope (six points in the third) getting hot and Peyton Watson (five) chipping in off the bench. By the end of the third, the Nuggets had pushed their lead to ten.
In the fourth, Denver threatened to pull away. The lead was 11 with just under five minutes left, when Jokić slipped an impossible pass to Aaron Gordon for an easy two. Then Holiday made a shot. Then another. Then another. Eight points for Holiday in a two-minute span. Down two with 45 seconds left, Tatum found himself wide open in the corner. A three to take the lead rimmed out, Gordon slammed home another dunk on the other end and the Nuggets squeezed out a six-point win.
"We had our chances,” said Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla. “And when you play against another good team, those things get magnified."
It was the last scheduled meeting between these two teams, but possibly not the last of the season. Both are favorites to meet again in the Finals. And if they do, Boston will have to find different answers for Jokić. None of the defenses Mazzulla drew up bothered Jokić. None of the never-ending collection of elite defenders Boston threw at him could slow him down. Years of playing together has the Nuggets offense performing like an elite symphony and Jokić, all 6’11” of him, is the conductor.
"I think that a big differential between us and other teams is that we play for each other,” said Watson. “My brother's success is mine and so on and so forth.”
It’s Jokić who is in pursuit of more hardware, and the MVP race will likely run through Denver, too. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, the leader of the upstart Oklahoma City Thunder, is making a strong case but it’s games like the one against Boston that serve as a reminder that there should be little doubt who is the best player in the world. Jokić’s ability to control the game is unrivaled; his pace and decision making are virtually peerless. He averages the most touches per game, throws the most passes and is putting up numbers this season that rival the best year of Oscar Robertson. If the Nuggets momentum carries them back to the No. 1 seed, the MVP for Jokić will likely come with it.
Indeed, a year removed from its first championship and Denver looks like that title-winning team once again. Boston will be formidable if these two teams meet again in June, no question. But the Celtics have had two chances at the Nuggets and came up short. It’s Denver’s league, Jokić’s league until someone, anyone can knock them off.
