Nikola Jokic Is A Mountain Of Angst

Nikola Jokic had a rough time Monday night. The Nuggets rolled out a new starting lineup, one featuring Jonas Valanciunas as Jokic's front-court partner. Denver's opponent, the Utah Jazz, responded by sticking their own pasty big guy, Kyle Filipowski, onto Valanciunas, and leaving Jokic to be guarded by second-year man Elijah Harkless, who is on a two-way contract for a team trying very hard to lose basketball games. Harkless, generously listed at 6-foot-3, should be a light meal for Jokic; instead, Jokic spent most of his 36 minutes of floor-time having what appeared to be a nervous breakdown.

We cannot simply fly past the Valanciunas thing. Nuggets head coach David Adelman is drowning. Injuries have warped his rotation to hell—all four of his top forwards were unavailable Monday—and his bench is a disaster. They got nuked again Sunday by the reserves of the Minnesota Timberwolves, leaving Adelman determined to shuffle the putrid hand he's been dealt. "I have to find a unit that will actually do it, compete at a higher level," he said after Sunday's loss, in which Denver's bench lineup turned a nine-point lead into a seven-point deficit in one calamitous second-quarter run. "To me, that was the game. We let struggles offensively, missed shots, turn into horrendous defense. I told them after the game that’s just inexcusable." Valanciunas was a large part of what went wrong Sunday, posting a 152 defensive rating and finishing minus-15 in less than 10 minutes of action.

It's very funny to me that Adelman's solution, 30 hours later, was to remove Valanciunas from the bench unit not by packing him into a large box and shipping him to Kamchatka, but by ramming him into the starting lineup. It speaks to Utah's proficiency in the tanking arts that the Nuggets, who are one of four 38-win teams in the West and are only three games above the dreaded play-in, would try such a thing in a by-God regular-season contest.

Monday's experiment was always going to cramp Jokic's style. With Valanciunas pinned around the restricted area and basically incapable of moving swiftly or far along any dimensional axis, Jokic's preferred office space around the elbows became something of a prison. And in a lineup with Valanciunas and Christian Braun, another lousy shooter, Jokic would see help coming from every direction, and without the benefit of spacing. It was therefore especially rude and unhelpful that Harkless, grinding like hell for a foothold in the NBA, relentlessly fought Jokic for every inch of space, fronted him like crazy, tangled with him even during ho-hum screen-setting, and in general dry-humped him to within an inch of his life. And it wasn't just Harkless: Other of Utah's small guys, ones even punier than Harkless, were constantly throwing their butts at Jokic and knotting their limbs into his. Keyonte George, who is approximately the height and weight of a mature egret, at least twice managed to fully incapacitate Jokic by boxing him out or fronting him.

Bennett Durando of the Denver Post described it as "the 'frustrate Jokic' playbook," and buddy, it worked. Jokic scored 16 points on 11 shots and did what for another center would be a respectable amount of rebounding and playmaking, but he looked suicidal, the Nuggets barely won his minutes, and I would not have been gobsmacked to wake up today to news that he'd retired overnight and returned to his horses. As a neutral I found Utah's determination pretty miserable to watch, though admirable, and despised it all the more for the certainty that Utah would pull the plug in an instant if they ever looked too threatened by their greatest enemy, victory.

Jokic is lately more susceptible than usual to bad moods. You can frustrate him to the point of distraction, yes with a painful and disqualifying flagrant foul, but also with pesky defensive persistence, or by boxing out, or by blowing or not blowing a whistle. Monday's game had everything he currently most hates about basketball: opponents, referees, teammates, gravity, and the flow of time.

Since returning from a knee injury that kept him out of the lineup for a month, it is not an exaggeration to say that Jokic has often seemed more concerned with throwing little tantrums and trying to convince the referees that he's being fouled than he has been with actually winning basketball games. As last night's game entered clutch time, and the Jazz seemed to be pulling away with an unthinkable victory, Jokic was busy throwing himself on top of Kyle Filipowski so as to demonstrate, I don't know, how unfair it is that defenders are allowed to touch him? Defector editor-in-chief Tom Ley, who has spent each of the last 27 televised Nuggets game developing and intensifying an ongoing meltdown, accurately described a particular knot in Denver's recent offense as Jokic "standing at the free-throw line and doing the Elaine Benes dance because he's mad another person is near him." Harkless, bless him, was doing so much more than existing near Jokic: He gave Utah 26 minutes of absolute defensive commitment, and fouled out, and very nearly forced them to win a basketball game.

This is a rotten time for Denver's best player to be in tantrum mode. The conference around them is fat in the middle with wobbly also-rans, the bottom third of the league is tanking, and even with a mangled roster the Nuggets could be setting their sights higher in the standings. Instead they went 6–7 in February, albeit against a pretty tough schedule, and have fallen from second in the West on Jan. 31 to fifth. Jokic has not been horrendous, production-wise, but he's out of sorts, sulky and whiny and more inclined than ever to hunt cheesy whistles and then receive their denial as an unforgivable personal insult. While he is engaged in theatrical ref-baiting stunts, Denver's offense is an agonizing mess of contested hand-offs and Norman Dale-esque performative weaving, buoyed to a really shocking degree by transition heroics and Murray's high-wire shot-making. It sucks, and it's not working. A few healthy forwards would help, but you do not want to find yourself pinning hopes of a late surge on the return of Cam Johnson.

If there's good news, it's that the Nuggets truly cannot fall very far. Johnson and Spencer Jones should rejoin the rotation this week, Peyton Watson isn't far away, and before very long Aaron Gordon will emerge from his strange warehouse home. Adelman's rotation will necessarily become less baldly insane. Spacing will naturally ease, timing will improve, and Valanciunas will be tricked into a locked coat closet. The Nuggets have to hope that this will lift Jokic's spirits, and he will return to playing good basketball. He can get by in the box score as he is, surrendering the prize of the "frustrate Jokic" playbook, but the Nuggets cannot thrive like this. And, in any event, it's hell to watch.