Nikola Jokić is MVP yet again. So why are his Nuggets struggling in the playoffs?

Nikola Jokić continues to wind his way into the inner circle of the greatest basketball players ever. The Denver Nuggets’ otherworldly center won his third league MVP award on Wednesday night. He is just the ninth player to achieve that feat in the NBA, an achievement that usually ends with players – LeBron, Jordan, Magic, Wilt – becoming mononyms. Had Jokić finished one place higher in the voting in 2023, when he finished second to the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid, he would now be the only player to win the award four years in succession. Last year, he led the Nuggets, a historically mediocre franchise, to their first NBA championship.

At this stage in his career, it is difficult to overstate Jokić’s excellence. The 29-year-old Serb is a marvel of consistency, dominating opponents nearly every time he takes the floor. He is a scoring wizard, a playmaking savant and a rebounding menace. He even makes his free throws at a rate of better than 80% each year while nailing about 35% of his three-pointers. In doing all of that, Jokić answers the question, “What if Shaquille O’Neal could shoot?” The 2015 second-round pick has gotten so mind-numbingly good that almost nobody even bothers to debate if he is the best player alive. By now, it is taken for granted.

But he may not be good enough to get the Nuggets back to the NBA finals this year. At the moment, Denver trail the high-flying Minnesota Timberwolves 2-0 in their best-of-seven Western Conference semi-final series. The first two games, contested on the Nuggets’ floor, were jarring. The reason for the jolt wasn’t so much that the upstart Wolves could win a few games, but that Jokić and his teammates looked so powerless to stop them from doing so. In Tuesday’s Game 2, a 106-80 final score somehow didn’t do justice to just how badly the Nuggets were beaten up.

Over the first two games of the series, Minnesota exploited the only part of Jokić’s game that could plausibly be called a weakness: his defense. Jokić is 6ft 11in and an astonishing athlete, but he spends lots of energy on being a singular offensive and rebounding force, and it occasionally shows when he is guarding his own basket. In Game 2, the Wolves closed by making eight of nine field goals on which Jokić was the primary defender. Those were a mix of pullup jumpers, driving layups, dunks, and fadeaways, and the common thread was that Minnesota’s players were unafraid to go after the best player in the world.

In one symbolic sequence, Wolves star Anthony Edwards darted toward Jokić in transition, stopped for a pull-up three-pointer, and missed. But Minnesota center Naz Reid simply crashed to the rim, slipped around Jokić, and soared for a putback one-handed dunk as the MVP watched.

Jokić had 16 points, 16 rebounds, and eight assists on Tuesday because, even on his worst nights, he remains prolific. But he was also disjointed. His shots didn’t fall, his creative passes crossed the line into looking silly, and the Nuggets were blown away in a shocking display of offensive futility. Jokić is famously direct in his public comments, but when a reporter asked him how the Nuggets would respond in Game 3 in Minneapolis, he replied, “I don’t know. We will see.”

Jokić needs to figure something out. The Nuggets are nearly on the brink, and the T-Wolves seem well-equipped to play against Jokić, who has averaged 5.5 turnovers a game this series. Added to that, Minnesota have not one great center but two, in Karl-Anthony Towns, who has improved his long-mocked defense, and four-time NBA defensive player of the year, Rudy Gobert (worryingly for the Nuggets, Gobert missed Tuesday’s game to attend the birth of his child). If anyone can counter Jokić, it is this team, with its oft-described “Twin Towers” taking turns going up against him and with Edwards leading the charge. And that’s before we get to the stifling defense from the rest of the team (look how Reid frustrates Jokić in this sequence).

Having said all that, Jokić’s presence is the primary reason not to count out the defending champions. On the rare occasions when he underperforms, he tends to bring his wrath full-bore the next game, which in this case will be on Friday. Jokić was 5-for-13 from the field in Game 2. The last time he had such a lousy shooting game was on 17 March in Dallas, when he was 6-for-16. Naturally, two nights later, Jokić was 14-for-22 and posted 35 points and 16 rebounds. The opponents that evening were … these same Timberwolves, playing on the same court where Games 3 and 4 of this series will be contested.

A comeback in this series, against a team with one of the league’s brightest young faces in Edwards, would be a memorable moment in Jokić’s career. But a loss won’t be defining – it would more about the brilliance of Edwards and Minnesota’s excellent defense than Jokić’s shortcomings, along with undercooked performances from teammates like Jamal Murray, who has struggled to shoot and control his temper.

Come next season, Jokić will attempt to win four MVPs in five years, something only Bill Russell and LeBron James have done. Jokić will be the overwhelming favorite for the honor going into the season, and at this juncture, the only question is whether he will do it with two championship rings on his fingers or one.