The Night Nikola Jokic Realized He Was "The One"
Chaos was happening all around the ship, but as the code ran across the screen, all Morpheus could do was look on in disbelief. Perhaps it was from what he was seeing, or maybe that’s the feeling you get when your faith in something that lies beyond all rational understanding comes to fruition. Either way, it was happening. Neo was standing up. He could feel it; he saw the world differently. And as Agent Smith’s .50 Caliber Desert Eagles roared to life, Neo felt the most peculiar feeling: calmness. Nothing would ever be the same again. He was The One.
A Matrix Moment:
Breakthrough moments, like Neo experienced in that abandoned apartment building hallway, happen to players in the NBA every season.
I’ve been fortunate to see clients have moments like Neo’s over the past five seasons. You are never guaranteed to have one, and there is no formula for what may or may not trigger it. But when they happen, they are special. You can feel it. They can feel it. It’s palpable. I do not refer to them as breakthroughs but as matrix moments. A moment in time when, like Neo, the player has broken through the darkest point before dawn. After that, they see themselves and the game in an entirely different light. I described the first one I experienced to Harrison Wind of DNVR in a piece he wrote about Malik Beasley’s breakout season back in 2019.
I never worked with Nikola Jokic, but my first NBA client was his teammate. Because of the process I use to build my client's plans, I watched every Denver Nuggets game from October 2017 to August 2020. During this time, I saw the evolution of the 2023 NBA Champions from their infant state and watched Jokic ascend the ladder from starter to All-Star, then All-NBA, and eventually league MVP.
I still remember the night everything changed. It was January 6th, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia. The legendary Denver Nuggets play-by-play man Chris Marlow said it was Serbian Christmas that night. So naturally, Big Honey must have felt the magic in the air from across the Atlantic.
After that night in Atlanta, Nikola Jokic would never see himself or the game in the same light again.
You Can’t Skip Steps:
No phrase has been pumped out more over the past eight years by Michael Malone and the Denver Nuggets organization than this one. It became the rallying cry for their journey together, the verbal embodiment of what building an organizational foundation looked like. These steps were meant to take them to the mountaintop and ensure sustained success once they arrived. Not skipping steps was always mentioned in a macro sense; it was about the team learning to become champions.
Underneath this macro umbrella of steps, many micro ones had to be conquered, too. Nikola Jokic's climb of his personal Everest was the most daunting of all the micro ones in the queue. He was currently resting at the All-NBA base camp, a place few have seen, but to get to where the Nuggets wanted to go, he needed to pick up the ice axe again and ascend to the peak. A sacred place only seen by thirty-three men before he made it there in 2022. A place reserved for League MVPs.
Over the past thirty years, only two teams have won an NBA championship without having a current League MVP on their roster. The 2004 Detroit Pistons and 2019 Toronto Raptors, that’s it. One team in each of the last four NBA Finals has arrived without a current league MVP; they all lost.
My college coach, Roy Williams, used to say he would treat us all fairly, but that doesn’t mean we would all be treated equally. Everything in life is relative. So, while all the steps were necessary, this one, Jokic’s step, was the most indispensable of them all to the Denver Nuggets’ journey.
The Glitch:
Entering the game vs. the Hawks on January 6th, 2020, Jokic had a specific code he followed during every game he played: Make the proper read. He is a savant at seeing the game in a binary fashion: if he sees help, he passes. If no help is coming, he attacks. At its epicenter, this is the game of basketball; it’s not overly complicated. To put it mildly, the ability to play basketball like this vs. the level of athleticism and intelligence in the NBA is beyond uncommon. It’s supernatural.
To this point, his code had one glitch: The sustained level of aggression for his own offense could experience lulls. Maybe it was because he grew up playing in Europe, where getting forty points was less celebrated than in the States. Perhaps instead of hearing, “Oh, that’s a tough bucket” from a Coach or the internet, he was told, “Next time you see help early, move it early to the advantage. That way, our team gets to play the possession vs. a cracked defensive shell instead of taking an off-balance contested shot.” But this is just a guess. I have no idea why there would be lulls, but there were.
Most starters in the NBA experience four different runs during a standard game, one in each quarter. Jokic generally showed a higher level of aggression towards his own offense in the first and third quarters. I believe the reason for the aggression in those quarters was to establish himself as a presence as early as possible. He wanted help to be thrown his way. This strategy would open up optionality in the offense for his teammates for as much game time as possible.
Here is a quick look at Jokic’s field-goal attempts by quarter during the 2019/20 season.
1st Quarter - 275
2nd Quarter - 229
3rd Quarter - 305
4th Quarter - 227
That’s 27% more attempts during the first and third quarters than in the second and fourth quarters, not insignificant.
Shooting the ball yourself isn’t always viewed as a selfless act, but for the top players in the world, sometimes it’s the best way to open the game up for your teammates. In order to ensure defensive help is sent your way every possession, you have to be willing to miss a few shots and keep firing without losing confidence.
After all, that’s what it takes to win the NBA Finals, the place where the Denver Nuggets were hoping all their steps were leading them towards. Your MVP must have an unbreakable inner confidence to miss and keep firing without ever blinking. The last eight Finals MVPs have averaged 28.7 FG + FT attempts over 45 games. That list is comprised of players who fall into the single-name recognition category: Curry, Durant, Giannis, Jokic, Kawahi, and LeBron—the who’s who of the current basketball landscape.
Seeing The Matrix:
Every shot is a transference of energy. A player’s shot prep footwork initiates this process; it starts the machine.
As someone who has worked exclusively with NBA players on shooting the basketball for the past five years, I believe the feet provide a window into the player's shot more so than any other body part. You can see where energy is loaded and where it’s not, but most importantly, you can see their emotions. Do they see the shot as an opportunity, or are they reluctantly taking it?
Shot from Game 10 vs. Hawks in the same season. Jokic’s right foot tells the whole story. He knows the read is shoot but hesitates on the shot prep footwork. He kills the rhythm and balance, significantly decreasing the efficiency of power that can translate to the shot.
Shot from Game 37 vs. Hawks. Watch his Right foot. This is drastically different energy from Jokic, both in the actual transfer of energy from his body to the ball via his shot prep footwork and his emotional energy. This is an opportunity for him.
The shot from Game 10 couldn’t be more different than the one from Game 37. One is a manual car that bunny-hops while getting out of first gear, and the other is a smooth transition into acceleration, just like Dominic Toretto does every time.
After the third three Jokic shot that night, Scott Hastings, a former NBA player and commentator for Denver Nuggets games, said, “They backed off him in the game in Denver. He’s talking to the bench over there, too, to the head coach.” Jokic was letting Lloyd Pierce, the Head Coach of the Atlanta Hawks, know that he wouldn’t stop shooting. It was a fool's mission to think this strategy would work on him. Continue at your own risk.
As the game went on, Jokic kept firing away, but he went through a cold spell from deep in the third quarter. The shots had great shot prep footwork and were shot confidently, but they just happened not to go in. He knew he still needed to be aggressive in scoring the ball, so he set up his number during a Hawks free throw.
The Hawks were shooting on The Nuggets’ side of the floor, right in front of our friend Scott Hastings, who listened to a conversation between Jokic and Jamal Murray. As the final free throw was in the air, Scott said, “I love watching the communication going on between Jokic and Murray. Jokic is pleading with him; I think he told him he’s going to half-roll it.”
This is the half-roll action after the free-throw conversation between Jokic and Murray. Jokic was setting up all of his scoring options. As he told Lloyd Pierce in the first half, continue this strategy at your own risk.
The Nuggets thrive in movement around Jokic; it’s their collective superpower and has been a calling card of their offense for years. The strategy employed by The Hawks that night was designed to do one thing and one thing only: take away that movement and make Jokic beat them by scoring. No sequence of events stood out more in real-time as a micro matrix moment for Jokic than the one at the end of the second quarter.
The Hawks went into the game with a strategy to make Jokic beat them by scoring. Jokic tried to get others involved before he broke the strategy, but it didn’t work. So he went back to shooting it himself till he broke it.
The Hawks' strategy that night wasn’t unique; other NBA teams had used it before on Jokic. He had always shown a willingness to score, but at his core, Jokic wanted to play team basketball, not one-on-one. January 6th, 2020, was a new level of sustained aggression from Jokic. It was a step forward.
Full Circle:
With three minutes and thirty seconds to go in the game, The Nuggets found themselves in a one-possession battle. This was usually when Jokic was willing to be aggressive in scoring the ball; after all, he’s hit the most go-ahead clutch shots in the NBA since 2019, but something different happened that night. The Hawks flipped their strategy. Jokic had been aggressively looking for his offense all night and letting everyone in the building know about it, including The Hawks’ head coach Lloyd Pierce. He had broken them, and now the floodgates were about to open.
After The Hawks hit a three to make it a one-possession game, The Nuggets would score on five straight possessions and eight of their last nine; the only miss was a grenade three as the shot clock wound down after the game was already decided.
What made these possessions unique was how the scores came about; they weren’t tough shots. Jokic didn’t need to hit the Sambor Shuffle. He had already created a fear in The Hawks that they would live with anyone but him shooting. The last three minutes and thirty seconds on January 6th, 2020, in Atlanta, Georgia, cemented the Matrix Moment for Nikola Jokic and charted his course to multiple MVPs and an NBA Championship.
Jokic already showed that if they didn’t Veer Switch Young in the PnR coverage, he would half-roll and shoot a fifteen-footer vs. the Alex Len deep drop. So they pivoted the coverage, and The Nuggets punished the mismatch.
Jokic already showed he would take it and make this shot vs. deep drop coverage. So they pivoted the coverage, and The Nuggets punished the mismatch.
Jokic already showed that if they didn’t Veer Switch Young in the PnR coverage, he would half-roll and shoot a fifteen-footer vs. the Alex Len deep drop. So, they pivoted the coverage and willingly put themselves in a mismatch that led to rotation. All to prevent Jokic from shooting, which was the opposite strategy they went into the game trying to deploy.
After these three possessions, the Hawks called a timeout. They pivot their strategy once again to go small on Jokic, subbing Alex Len out in favor of Vince Carter. On the fourth possession, Jokic scored in the post vs. Carter, a mismatch. Jokic then finds Murray on a backdoor cut to end the fifth possession with a wide-open lay-up.
Those five possessions take all of two minutes and nine seconds. The Nuggets go from up three to up nine, and for all intents and purposes, the game is over.
The Line of Demarcation:
Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, the most valuable company in the world, said, “You can’t connect dots looking forward; you can only connect the dots looking backward.”
Before that night in Atlanta, Jokic had played 341 games in his career. he produced:
On January 6th, 2020, Jokic attempted 41 combined field goals and free throws: twenty-five field goals and sixteen free throws. The 16 free throws were a career-high at that point and still rank as his second-most attempted game ever. He has only surpassed the 41 combined number twice in his career.
This was it, his step, his Matrix Moment.
Since that night in Atlanta, Georgia, Jokic has played an additional 271 games. He’s produced:
The eighty-three games represent a 315% increase in 30-point games from the previous 341 games before January 6th, 2020.
The thirteen games represent a 333% increase in 40-point games from the previous 341 games before January 6th, 2020.
The forty-nine games represent a 716% increase in 30 combined FG + FT attempt games from the previous 341 games before January 6th, 2020.
This uptick in shots didn’t translate to an increase in the win/loss column during those 49 games. The Nuggets won 32 and lost 17, around the same winning percentage as all the other games during that timeframe. The most important part was the reps. He got the reps, the team got the reps, and from those reps came confidence.
The most significant confidence boost came from his teammates, notably Will Barton, who was a central character in helping to shape Jokic into a nightmare for the entire league. His quote perfectly summarizes Jokic’s teammates’ reaction to his ultra-aggressive night in Atlanta: “We go as he goes. I feel like no one can stop him.”
You don’t just get in the ring with Ali because you think you can box, just like you don’t just show up to the NBA Finals and average 28.7 combined field goals and free throw attempts because you think you can hoop. You must work up the ladder, learn the ropes, get the reps, and gain perspective. You can’t skip steps.
In Jokic’s sixty-eight career playoff games, he’s produced twenty games of 30 or more combined field goal and free throw attempts—a rate of 29.4%.
Jokic’s awakening on January 6th, 2020, was the point of no return. Those 49 games represent his climb from the final base camp to the peak of his step.
What Comes Next:
Time will tell. Jokic is an anomaly, and he’s just getting started. At some point, the talk will inevitably shift to where he stands in the all-time greats list.
There have been others before him, and others will come after him, but it is his world out there right now. He is The One who sets the rules, and everyone else has to play by them.