If an alien with a baseline understanding of basketball had descended from the heavens just in time for the 4th quarter of Monday’s playoff bout between Phoenix and Denver, they might’ve thought something like this:
“Wow! Jock Landale is a truly dominant center! Not one of the Denver frontcourt players can box him out, Denver must lack an interior presence to negate his offensive rebounding.”
And our extraterrestrial friend wouldn’t be wrong, either.
In the first two and a half minutes of the 4th quarter, the Suns took six shots while the Nuggets only took two, with Phoenix bench big Landale drawing three fouls (two while attacking the glass and one while sealing Christian Braun) in that stretch. The Nuggets’ Jeff Green-Aaron Gordon backline is structureless, flimsy against any sort of quasi-meaningful size. A strategy that, on a night where the typically dynamic Denver offense was unusually sluggish, may have lost Denver home court advantage against the star-powered Suns.
Enter, then, one Nikola Jokic. Jokic checked in with 9:25 to go in a game tied 73-73, the only points scored thus far in the frame was a Kentavious Caldwell-Pope three pointer. His first play upon checking in? A demeaning one-handed rebound, casually repelling Landale with his free arm, into a Jokic-Jamal Murray two-man game resulting in another KCP three point bomb.
The Nuggets would go on to win 97-87, but within a 30 second frame, Jokic immediately stabilized both ends of the court for the Nuggets. In a critically important Game 2 with Murray, Michael Porter Jr., and Aaron Gordon combining to shoot 9/31, Jokic needed to be the best version of himself: the NBA’s foremost supercomputer processing solutions to his team’s needs on both ends of the floor.
Yes, both ends of the floor. For as much as Jokic has been the league’s most reliable offensive hub in 2023, the fourth quarter against the Suns demonstrated that his feel for the game is not limited to offense. When the Suns attacked Denver’s no-middle defense with Josh Okogie as the short-roller/decision maker, Aaron Gordon jumped on an Okogie fake and left Deandre Ayton wide open for the jam.
I’m unsure exactly what Jokic said to Gordon, but I would like to believe it was something along the lines of, “It’s Josh f****** Okogie man.” It clearly had an impact on Gordon’s strategy on the rotation to the short roller. Later in the quarter, still applying no-middle but this time blitzing the ball screen, Gordon shaded toward Okogie instead of committing, forcing the worst offensive option for the Suns to make an important decision late in the game. The result was a bad shot and a won possession for the Nuggets:
Jokic’s recognition of personnel and concepts is key to the Nuggets defensive strategy against the Suns. The moments where Devin Booker and Kevin Durant go nuclear are unstoppable, but exploiting weaknesses around the edges is how the Nuggets can contain Phoenix’s explosive offense. Despite his athletic limitations, he solves so many problems just by recognizing the offensive potency of each opposing player.
Against Cameron Payne (who is decidedly not Chris Paul), Jokic relied on heavy drop concepts and his underrated strength to man the paint. Against Booker, he hedged until the defender had a chance to recover, forcing Book to at least consider making a decision and delaying his process while the weakside defenders got organized. And against Durant, Jokic hard blitzed the PnR to get the ball out of his hands and into Okogie’s. All the while retreating to the paint to establish early positioning for rebounds. Positioning, the thing that the Nuggets couldn’t stop Jock Landale from establishing without Jokic.
And offensively, Jokic has no equal. He had 39 points on 17/30 shooting in 41 minutes. When the Nuggets needed his completely singular skillset the most, he delivered. The earlier clip–where Jokic processes Booker’s rotation before he does and gets KCP a wide open corner look–is a small sample of how Jokic’s offensive mastery ushered the Nuggets to victory.
Poor, poor Deandre Ayton. Despite some pretty sound defense, or what would be sound defense against most centers, Jokic routinely found space to attack and took complete advantage of how Ayton was utilized in Phoenix’s scheme. In the PnR, Jokic took up just enough space to get the best shot possible without a meaningful contest from Ayton:
In one-on-one defensive contexts, Ayton stood no chance. Despite possessing a myriad of athletic advantages, Jokic simply overpowered the former number-one overall pick.
In the first clip, while obviously a tough shot, Jokic waits until Murray spaces to the three-point line to attack that gap in between the free throw line and the right block. The second shot is humiliation on national television. The aggressive hips and early seal in semi-transition puts the Suns’ defense irreparably behind the eight-ball. Barbecue chicken. He’s hunting an iso matchup against the only reliable two-way big the Suns roster.
The third clip is just Jokic being a cheat code. After some initial off ball action, Denver runs Horns Out (where the player at one elbow sets a screen for the player at the opposite elbow, a play that Phoenix runs a lot for Durant) for Jokic, who immediately attacks Ayton’s chest and draws a foul. There is exactly one other center in the NBA who you can reliably run this set for and he’s the MVP of the Association. Back to our E.T. correspondent after watching the rest of the 4th quarter:
Jokic is become PnR death, destroyer of worlds defenses.
Profound words, but there are still some counters the Suns could employ to contain Jokic’s impact. While it sounds nonsensical, establishing a smaller defender on Jokic may actually short circuit the Nuggets’ offense. Placing Ayton, Bismack Biyombo, or even Durant as the weak side helper and matching up Torrey Craig as the primary could deter his decision-making and ultimately afford the defense more time for recovery.
The Sixers implemented this strategy during the regular season (as analyzed by the great team at Thinking Basketball) to great effect, and while Craig is no P.J. Tucker and Ayton is certainly no Joel Embiid, the concept of forcing Jokic to see the biggest body possible on the help has its merits. Though I’m sure Jokic will crack that code too. Game 3 on May 5th.
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