It’s Cool That Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić Are the Two Best Players in Basketball

Amid complaints of boring sameness, the NBA's top two players either play like our all-time favorites, or no one else.

Shai Gilgeous-Alexander drives past Nikola Jokic on Wednesday, November 6, 2024. (AAron Ontiveroz/The Denver Post)

While I have been skeptical of some runaway analytics trends in the NBA — are we at the point where 3-pointers do need to cool it some? — the common criticisms of the league can also be annoying sometimes.

Recently, my longtime FiveThirtyEight colleague

Jared Dubin

has done a great job of debunking one of the most irritating of those, which is that “every team plays the same now”. Jared showed that both on offense and defense, teams do a varied assortment of different things — from shot selection, pace and movement when they have the ball to aggression, pressure, fouling and rebounding tactics when they don’t. And although 3s have become a far more pervasive part of the game than in the past, essentially at the expense of midrange jumpers, there is still a fairly wide gap between the teams that shoot the most and least.

(Hilariously, the difference in share of shots that are 3s between the highest and lowest in the league this season — 20 percentage points between the Celtics and Nuggets — is actually wider than the 18-point gap between high and low from 20 years ago.)

So the notion that today’s game is less diversified than in the past is probably BS. And if we want further proof that the current NBA has a wide variety of successful — or just downright weird — playing styles, we ought to look no further than the two best players in the league right now: Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Nikola Jokić.