Did you watch Kings–Nuggets last night? So did Nikola Jokic. The three-time MVP had one of his worst games of the season against the mediocre and shorthanded Kings, laboring to 22 points and 15 rebounds with seven turnovers and a relatively ghastly minus-seven. Jokic has been struggling a bit by his incredible standards since the all-star break, which is mostly due to opposing coaches borrowing a hilarious stratagem rolled out by Lakers coach JJ Redick in L.A.'s impressive blowout win over Denver two weeks ago. The scheme is simple: Deny Jokic the ball, at any cost, compromising every other part of your defense if you have to. The scheme runs counter to almost every modern maxim of defense, yet it's working.
In practice, here's what it looked like against Sacramento. Jake LaRavia's only job in the clip below is to essentially box Jokic out, while Markelle Fultz and DeMar DeRozan give about 10 feet of space to Peyton Watson and Russell Westbrook in order to be able to double Jokic the second he gets the ball. You hear maxims like "Force the rest of the team to beat you!" all the time, but rarely do you see defenses contort themselves like this. The Kings keep all five guys within a foot of the paint for the duration of the play, and Westbrook was kind enough to give them what they wanted by running into a poorly considered midrange jumper.
When Jokic does get the ball, helpers stay glued to the key, prepared to spring double- and even triple-teams on him. They collapse into the paint to prevent him from shooting the easy little flip shots and half hooks that he kills most defenders with, take away the quick interior passes to the dunker spot that generate easy points, and completely cede the three-point line. The Nuggets shoot the third-best percentage in the league from three, but they take the fewest threes per game. That's mostly a function of how effective Jokic is at generating shots at the rim.
This strategy is a wild overcorrection aimed at taking away the Nuggets' best offense, and it's worked pretty well for the three teams that have dedicated themselves to it. Look at how much pressure Jokic faces here, with every Lakers defender turned to face him.
This is an extension of the previous accepted best practice for guarding Jokic: with a power forward, leaving the center to roam and be prepared to rotate in on Jokic if he commits to a drive. Redick talked about this very scheme and its potential pitfalls with his now-colleague LeBron James on their podcast last season. But when the Nuggets and Lakers met two weeks ago, Redick treated the matchup like a postseason game and extended the scheme to ridiculous lengths. Denver was one spot ahead of L.A. in the standings and had won 13 of their last 14 meetings. The Lakers were also newly center-less, which made any sort of conventional coverage difficult. Denver was not ready for Redick's plan, and Jokic shot 2-for-7 in the game.
Boston ran a version of this on Sunday and it worked again, limiting Jokic to 20 points and zero free-throw attempts. The Kings led most of Wednesday night's game until their offense sputtered late and the Nuggets took 13 trips to the line in the fourth quarter. If the Nuggets had initially concluded that Redick's anti-Jokic scheme was only something that top-level opponents could trouble them with, last night's game brought a much more grim reality into focus: If the Sacramento Kings can fuck up Denver's offense this badly, then any NBA team can do it.
The Redick scheme has an extremely obvious weakness, which is that it cedes huge pastures of space to every other Denver player. The Nuggets' offense is based around Jokic, and the team does not seem quite prepared either to find ways to counter this scheme or to accept the gambit and play through the other four guys and the huge advantage they'll have.
Denver head coach Michael Malone, whose answer to every scheme question comes back to playing better defense, said the way to counter the Redick scheme was to play better defense. He's right, to a degree. It is harder for opponents to set up five guys in the paint if the Nuggets are running off misses and turnovers, and Denver does rely to a certain degree on their pace, the fifth-highest in the NBA. But while simply getting more stops might work in the regular season against most opponents, that's not a workable strategy in the playoffs.
The thing that makes the Redick plan so fascinating is that it's such a gamble: If the Nuggets were prepared to live with such a shot selection, their good shooters like Michael Porter Jr. and Jamal Murray, who has been great lately, could expect to take like 12 open threes per game. The Nuggets could also relocate Jokic out of the paint and run more traditional pick-and-roll stuff to get him the ball on the move, which they do in crunch time anyway. There are solutions, is my point, and though changing up your offensive identity in March is annoying, Denver has to take the opportunity now, before the Western Conference's good defenses behead them in the playoffs.
