Should You Make Nikola Jokić Beat You As A Scorer, Not A Passer?
Should You Make Nikola Jokić Beat You As A Scorer, Not A Passer?
Or is the whole premise silly?
In the wake of the Miami Heat’s series-tying 111-108 win over the Denver Nuggets in Game 2 of the NBA Finals, ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne asked Erik Spoelstra a question about Nikola Jokić’s 41 points (but only 4 assists) that turned the Heat coach very prickly:
Personally, I thought that his response (“that's the untrained eye that says something like that”) was pretty unfair to Shelburne. Because whether Spoelstra agrees with it or not — or is actually trying to avoid giving away his strategies 🤔 — the narrative coming out of Game 2 is unavoidable: You have to pick your poison against a player who can do everything like Jokić can, and the Nuggets are now 0-3 in the playoffs when his scoring is the main source of danger.
All of this got me and reader
talking in the comments of my recent post about the Nuggets offense. Here’s what Nick said:“[…] the Nuggets are 0-3 in the postseason when Jokic scores more than 40. Which is just wild.
That raises an interesting question. NBA teams (generally) need a superstar to succeed, but are they more successful when their star *doesn't* dominate the game? Or is that unique to the Nuggets?”
To look into this, the first thing I did was to examine performances by all NBA superstars, searching for groups of games that were roughly similar in quality but with some being more high-scoring than others. Because every 40+ point game in the playoffs since 2021 also carried a Game Score of at least 25, I took that to be a representative sample of “really good individual games” in recent postseasons. Then I looked for all players in that list who had at least 2 games with a 25+ Game Score and 40+ points, and at least 2 games with a 25+ Game Score and fewer than 40 points.
There were 13 players who fit those criteria, listed below. For each, we can look at their average stats — and more importantly, their team’s success — in each subset of games, and examine the differences in what happens when they have a super-high-scoring performance versus every other kind of strong outing. (And just as a note, for the “weighted average” row, I weighed the composite numbers by the harmonic mean of a player’s 40-point and non-40-point games, so that players with a greater sample in both game types will receive more weight in the analysis.)
Overall, this group of star players had far more points on a better shooting efficiency in the games where they scored 40+ (no surprise, given the setup for how we grouped games). But in games of roughly similar quality where they didn’t score 40, they contributed more assists and slightly more rebounds (again, not surprising) and they also won games at a solidly higher clip — 67% to 56%, after calculating the weighted average.
This accounts for nothing regarding why each player might have scored less; maybe a teammate was hot and the star was feeding him, or he was conserving himself on defense, or sat at the end of a blowout. In other words, maybe the causation arrow goes the opposite direction of what this data implies, that the player scored less because his team was doing well rather than vice-versa. But it is an interesting note in favor of the theory that teams seem to do better when their superstars play well but don’t overly dominate the scoring column.
As for the specific case of Jokić himself, there are some truly fascinating splits to unpack regarding the effect of his scoring versus passing on Denver’s record. Again looking back to 2020-21, I gathered all of his regular-season or playoff games with at least a Game Score of 28, since all of his 40-point games over that span were above that threshold. Again, this gives us a representative group of “good Jokić games” that we can then slice and dice based on how much he scored, assisted and so forth.
In terms of games that met nice, round statistical cutoffs, Jokić had just about the same number of 35+ point games (41) as he had 10+ assist games (44) within our sample. In both groupings, he also played at about the same level by Game Score — but the Nuggets won more in his high-assist games (72.7% WPct) than in his high-scoring ones (65.9%).
That trends holds — and becomes even more interesting — when we break each of those groups into further subsets of games by points and assists.
In 35+ point games within our sample where Jokić also got 10+ assists, the Nuggets’ winning percentage rose to 66.7%; in 35-point games where he failed to drop 10 dimes, it fell to 65.5%. And in the 16 games where he scored 35+ but didn’t even reach 7 assists (similar to the performance he had in Game 2 of the Finals), Denver only had a winning percentage of 50%. Flip it around to look at assists, and the Nuggets actually have a higher winning percentage in our sample when Jokić doles out 10+ assists but scores under 35 (75.0%) and especially under 28 (76.5%) than when he gets both 35 and 10 (66.7%).
Does that mean Jokić should try to score fewer points as long as he’s passing the ball around a lot? (Or that Miami should automatically want the opposite?) Obviously no — ideally, he’d produce a ton of high-percentage shots for both himself and his teammates, which is typically why Denver’s offense has been so hard to stop. Jokić is one of the game’s best at passing, shooting and scoring, and he’s surrounded by a bunch of talented teammates who can all hurt a defense, too. To Spoelstra’s point, there’s no easy formula for defending the Nuggets.
Shelburne herself prefaced her question to Spoelstra with the admission that it was a bit of an oversimplification, and I think that’s true. Spoelstra is right that a coach and even his players have somewhat limited control over the whys and hows of whether an opposing superstar will beat them; the true goal is for Jokić to succeed as neither a scorer nor a passer, but that’s very difficult to achieve against the multi-time league MVP. These splits are mostly descriptive — when the Nuggets are clicking, it more often involves Jokić making his ridiculous passes than not. But in a series where both teams need every edge they can get, it’s not wrong to ask if Miami came across a template for what additional Finals wins might look like going forward.
Filed under: NBA