After his Oklahoma City Thunder finished up a spectacular Game 5 win against the Denver Nuggets, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander fielded a question about the game's best player: Nikola Jokic. The reigning MVP put together a near-perfect game against the presumptive MVP's team, with 44 points on 25 shots, 15 rebounds, and five assists that could have been thrice as many if any single one of his teammates could have hit one single shot after halftime. "It's a team sport," Gilgeous-Alexander said. "No one guy can do it." In what was comfortably the best game of the whole second round, and close to the best game of the 2025 NBA playoffs, one guy very nearly did it. That he could not answers some pretty important questions.
Jokic had not had a good series before Game 5. Apart from his Game 1 masterclass, Oklahoma City has been defending the hell out him, keeping Isaiah Hartenstein glued to his right shoulder while sending their ballhawking wings down to swipe at the ball and deny him the easiest pressure-release passes. He had 21 made field goals and 16 turnovers in the middle three games of this series, often looking flustered by all the pressure.
No matter what the cynics say, Jokic has put together so many spectacular performances in his playoff career that to appreciate them and properly distinguish them requires you to think through how many different defenders and schemes he's picked apart. On Tuesday night, he took the initiative and pounded his way into another all-time performance. Over and over, he was able to make space by taking a dribble or two into his man's chest, compromising the strategy of denying him his right shoulder by opening up a ton of space for his left. Jokic is such a nasty brute and gifted technician that you can't really do anything about him once he's able to make space, especially when he's nailing five of his seven three-point attempts and quick-shooting the (often great) weak-side help with same-foot, same-hand floaters.
His final bucket of the night was the best. Down 103–100 late in the fourth after Gilgeous-Alexander stepped back into an and-one basket over Jamal Murray, Denver's offense stalled out. Murray couldn't beat Lu Dort around a Jokic screen, and though Jokic got the Chet Holmgren switch he wanted, Oklahoma City's team defense forced him to go one-on-one from the top of the key with five seconds on the shot clock. Jokic initially called for a screen, realized the clock was dying too fast for all that, and twirled his way into a pogo-step three.
The problem was, that would turn out to be Denver's final meaningful bucket of the night.
The Nuggets held an edge for most of the game, and even as Jokic was mashing, they spent the final third of the game steadily whittling the lead away. Everything changed after Aaron Gordon hit a three with five minutes left in the third to put the Nuggets up 12. From that point, Jokic scored every non-garbage-time bucket for his team except for a Russell Westbrook tip shot at the end of the third quarter.
Many of the misses in that 17-minute stretch were open, but Oklahoma City's defense made most shot attempts in that period uncomfortable. Jamal Murray was briefly dancing in the third quarter, but he stopped getting space by the halfway mark. Aaron Gordon disappeared; neither Michael Porter Jr. nor Christian Braun could make a single shot; Peyton Watson flew around and Did Stuff, though he is not capable of doing anything on offense when the possessions matter most; and the Russell Westbrook Janus coin came up on the sad face. Jokic had no help from his buddies, and to his credit, he realized he had to do it all and spent the fourth quarter trying and nearly succeeding. Meanwhile, Oklahoma City's blender offense started to gouge the Nuggets.
Gilgeous-Alexander is correct that collective strength is what distinguishes the Thunder, though the operative question of these particular playoffs is the degree to which that matters when rotations tighten and any weak point is ruthlessly exposed. The way Denver built and maintained their advantage raised the uncomfortable question of whether Oklahoma City's collectivity is itself a weak point. Denver has happily sat back in a 2-3 zone for almost the entire series, making it difficult for Gilgeous-Alexander and Jalen Williams to drive into the lane and set off the sort of scrambles they spent the year punishing to brutal effect. There are two ways to break down a zone like this: Put a guy at the nail and work from there, often back-screening the low men to open space up in the corners or along the baseline, or simply make the wing threes that the zone allows.
Faced with those choices, the Thunder authored a 34–19 fourth quarter and won by seven. After a bad Game 4 and most of an equally bad Game 5, Dort came up huge, hitting three of those vaguely open wing threes in the fourth to draw Oklahoma City close, clamping down on Murray, and at one point diving into the crowd to recover a critical loose ball. From that point, Gilgeous-Alexander finally showed that he can do it in the biggest moments: squirming past Christian Braun (who's been great on him all series) to give Oklahoma City its first lead of the period with 3:33 left; stepping back on Murray with around two minutes left to put his team up three before the Jokic miracle; and putting the game on ice with a sidestep three, to go up by six with 48 seconds left. He'd been searching for that big shot all series, and he finally had a signature moment in the clutch, punctuating a quarter in which he scored 10 points and handed out three assists.
The Thunder's big run in the fourth was the first time they've looked truly comfortable since their 43-point blowout win in Game 2. This has been such a great series because the teams have so capably taken away each other's best stuff, leading to two paranoid, strange games in Denver to set up Game 5. First Denver won despite one of the worst games of Jokic's playoff career, then Oklahoma City gutted out one of the ugliest wins you'll ever see in Game 4. That was a gut-check win, a necessary one for a team that hasn't really been tested in crunch time all season. Of course, the Thunder haven't been in crunch time much this season because by the time fourth quarters have rolled around, they're usually up 25 and Gilgeous-Alexander is cheering on Adam Flagler from the sideline. Denver has made them squirm, and for most of last night, it seemed the Nuggets were going to assert their dominance and the dominance of basketball orthodoxies: The team with the best player wins, and young teams need to get bloodied in the playoffs a few times before they can win the games that matter.
But no, Oklahoma City pulled through with a signature blend of Gilgeous-Alexander's game-breaking drive game and the hive-mind passing stuff that's killed everyone all season. If Game 5 tells the story of a series, then the story is this: Nikola Jokic is the best player in this series, and the Thunder are the best team.
