After leading the Denver Nuggets to the first-ever NBA title in their 47-year existence, Nikola Jokic just wanted to go home to his horses. Never mind that he had just become the first player in NBA history to lead the charts for total points scored (600), rebounds (269) and assists (190) in a single playoffs season. Never mind that the Nuggets had plans to celebrate the NBA title with a parade in Denver.
On being asked how he felt to finally be an NBA champion, Jokic mumbled, “It’s good. It’s good. The job is done. We can go home now.”
Home for the 7-footed Jokic is Sombor, Serbia. The former Yugoslav nation topped up the heady euphoria of watching Novak Djokovic claim his 23rd Grand Slam title with the sight of another one of their own becoming an NBA champion and an NBA Finals MVP one day later.
“In Serbia sport was something that put us in front of everybody, even 10-20 years ago. Now we have Djokovic who is the best ever — for us, he is the best ever — and an NBA championship too. It’s a really good moment to be a Serbian,” Jokic said.
NBA turning international
It’s a good moment to be an international player too in the league.
After two seasons of being crowned the NBA MVP in the regular season, Jokic was pipped to the trophy this season by Cameroon’s Joel Embiid with Greece’s Giannis Antetokounmpo coming in third. The three players were also finalists for the regular season MVP title last time around.
“Look at the top 10 best players in the league. Around 75 percent are not born in the USA. That speaks volumes of how international the game has become,” Hall of Famer Ray Allen had said just last month while in India to conduct basketball clinics at the NBA Academy India.
Allen, who was part of the gold medal-winning American team at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, had gone on to predict that given how strong some of the players emerging out of Europe were, it would be only a matter of time before Team USA’s dominance at the Olympics would be under threat.
Tall ball comeback
Over the past decade or so, players like Steph Curry have led a revolution in the NBA with teams favouring shorter, speedier guards who can shoot the living daylights out of opposition teams from well beyond the three-point arc. This was usually at the expense of taller, burlier centres. This season too, many teams like the Golden State Warriors, Miami Heat and LA Lakers have preferred to go for shorter players at the centre position.
But the fact that Nuggets won the title, will force teams to switch tactics and revert to playing with taller players in the centre’s position like in the good old days, reckoned Allen.
“Denver, with Jokic in the team, and Philadelphia 76ers with Embiid, are similar. If Denver or Philadelphia win the title this year, the rest of the league is going to have to adjust to how they play. The rest of the teams in their conferences will have to have a big man who will have to contend with those guys. You cannot just play small ball. These two teams have set a trend that suggests the big guy is back! And that big guy shoots three-pointers. So teams will need a big guy that can guard Embiid or Jokic. A team like Golden State will have to add a big man who can be mobile and guard Jokic in the Western Conference if they want to be successful for the next 10 years,” Allen had said last month before adding, “Right now, Jokic is the best big man in the league because he can also pass.
He’s really crafty. He doesn’t overpower you. It’s not like he’s an athlete. Skill-wise he’s a hard player to guard.”
A centre and point guard
Unlike Giannis and Embiid — Jokic’s two rivals in the NBA MVP race — the Serb is not a sinewy, lean machine who looks like a pro athlete. He is not the fastest man on the court, and neither does he elevate too much when he shoots. His jump shot is more of a hop and rather than dunking, he usually rises gently before finger-rolling the ball into the net.
The current iteration of Jokic is still better conditioned than the Jokic before 2019, when Felipe Eichenberger, the head strength and conditioning coach at the franchise, convinced him to drop some weight, hire a chef, switch his diet. That transformation led to the Serbian to claim two MVP titles and now the Finals MVP.
“After games, Jokic would still work out hard and do sprints. His shirt was soaked after workouts, and he dropped weight,” Eichenberger told NBA’s website recently.
A complete antithesis to Jokic is Allen, who in his playing days had a body fat percentage hovering around four percent — a number that would make pro cyclists envious.
“I thought of myself as a race car,” said Allen as he spoke of his own draining routines in training where he would run on the treadmill until he was exhausted. And then he would try and fight through that.
Speaking of how much difference fitness can make to your game, Allen said: “Because of those routines, when that exhaustion comes in a game, there’s no drop in your quality because of fatigue. When you lose conditioning and you’re out of shape, you make bad decisions in a game,” said Allen, who won two NBA championships over a career that spanned 18 seasons. “Basketball doesn’t seem very fast when you are watching it. That’s because everyone’s moving at the same speed. Playing basketball requires you to be in the greatest shape of your life.”
Try telling that to Jokic.
More of a level playing field
In the last 10 seasons, seven different teams have won the NBA championships: San Antonio Spurs, Golden State Warriors, Cleveland Cavaliers, Toronto Raptors, LA Lakers, Milwaukee Bucks, Denver Nuggets. In the 30 seasons before that, only eight teams had claimed the title: Lakers, Boston Celtics, Chicago Bulls, Miami Heat, Dallas Mavericks, Detroit Pistons, Houston Rockets and Spurs.
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