Nikola Jokic is on his way to losing his status as NBA’s golden boy

Credit: Ron Chenoy-Imagn Images

The reign of Nikola Jokic as the NBA’s best player has corresponded with some of the league’s worst years in the public eye.

Jokic has won three MVP awards and a championship this decade, Sambor-shuffling around his doubters to become the go-to answer for most of NBA media as the league’s best player for six years running. Meanwhile, the league has struggled to manage tanking, injuries, load management, and a sense of sameness in the on-court product team to team.

For so many in NBA media, the Serbian big man was seen as an antidote to these problems. Jokic never misses games, plays unselfishly, and makes basketball beautiful. Watching Jokic and Denver, one can’t help but think of legends like Larry Bird, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, or Bill Walton.

But Jokic has not been back to the conference finals since winning the NBA title in 2023, and has seemingly run out of answers against Minnesota in this year’s first round. The Nuggets star is shooting worse than 40 percent from the field, and punctuated a blowout loss to the shorthanded Timberwolves on Saturday night by getting into a shoving match with Minnesota’s Jaden McDaniels in the final seconds of the game.

Down 3-1 in the series after three of the worst games of his career, Jokic is quickly losing all the goodwill he built up during his career. Many of Jokic’s biggest celebrators in the national media are openly questioning not only his future upside, but the way they analyzed his run up to this point.

“He is regarded as, correctly, this transcendent talent. Which he has been. But I do wonder if we got a little ahead of ourselves on some things,” said FS1’s Nick Wright on Monday.

Wright, who despite being an NBA diehard was notoriously late to come around on the three-time MVP, argued the cumulative effect of all the early exits is catching up to Jokic:

“When you add the way they lost as the defending champs, last year not getting out of round two, they lose in round one this year, it is fair to [ask], ‘Did we accelerate it too far?'”

Bill Simmons, one of the main conductors of the Jokic hype train throughout the decade and the recent author of a sorrowful monologue in which he flipped his MVP vote to Jokic from Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, is also beginning to regret his rhetoric.

“We’re four games into the series. I’m not ready to say this is one of the big disasters of all-time. I will say, if they get knocked out of this series and he’s looked the way he’s looked, it does feel like the ‘best player alive’ room, the door is going to open, and somebody’s going to be able to walk into that room now and be declared the new person.”

With Jokic no longer unquestioned at the top of the NBA pecking order, his other faults came into view. At FanDuel, Chandler Parsons said Jokic too often “gets a pass” and called the confrontation with McDaniels “dirty and bad for the game.” Back on First Things First, Wright called Jokic a “bad loser” and argued that the incident is actually on par with how he typically reacts when he loses a series.

The response may have been even stronger locally.

Even before the Game 4 loss, Denver-based content creator Swipa Cam argued on a podcast that Jokic would come under fire for his carefree attitude as one of the faces of the NBA if he flamed out of the series. Prominent Nuggets commentator Adam Mares called it “dumb” that Jokic’s main show of emotion in a do-or-die game came toward McDaniels.

Throughout his run of dominance, Jokic largely avoided scrutiny for the way he engaged with the broader business of the NBA. Jokic got a pass for being a Euro in a small market. Then he reached his pinnacle during a pandemic. All the while, the NBA failed to mint another “face of the league,” viewership dipped, and the league faced a barrage of negativity.

The Nuggets remained a draw as long as Jokic was making magic with the basketball. But this one big, sad postseason failure makes him just another star. Even his most fervent fans seem to agree.

Without the protection of unquestioned greatness, Jokic won’t be able to get away with dogging it at the All-Star Game, dismissing the importance of an NBA title, or refusing to promote the league.

And if the same analysts who pushed him as a generational legend are to be believed, Denver will not soon flip the switch back to contention around Jokic.

“There’s just a real discussion to be had about, Oklahoma and San Antonio are who they are, and did Denver just flat-out miss its chance at a second ring? Is the window closed for them?” said Zach Lowe on Sunday’s Bill Simmons Podcast. “Because Jokic and Murray are getting older … and the rest of their team is just not performing up to the level it needs to perform. Things happen fast in the NBA.”

When the takes are so deeply skewed in one direction, it’s fair to deride the media for playing up the news cycle. Many couched their criticism of Jokic with a reminder that the Nuggets could still come back and win the series; that all greats have bad series.

But all it took was three terrible games for Jokic to turn his most staunch defenders into critics and have a spotlight shone onto him as something less than special, and perhaps even as a culprit in the direction the league has gone under his watch.

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