“The Basketball 100” is the definitive ranking of the 100 greatest NBA players of all time from The Athletic’s team of award-winning writers and analysts, including veteran columnists David Aldridge and John Hollinger. This excerpt is reprinted from the book, which also features a foreword by Hall of Famer Charles Barkley.
“The Basketball 100” is available Nov. 26. Read David Aldridge’s introduction and all of the excerpts here.
Most of history’s great players have come to us with significant early hype and quick, confirmatory coronation events. A few greats have taken a more circuitous path.
Perhaps none has snuck up on us quite the way Nikola Jokić did. Forget about his origins as a pudgy second-round pick whose selection was made during a Taco Bell commercial. Even after he’d won two MVPs, much of the world wasn’t all that convinced he was a pantheon-level player. It wasn’t until after he’d led the Nuggets to a romp to the 2023 NBA title that his overdue recognition as an all-time great began.
Jokić doesn’t exactly conform to what an NBA superstar looks like. He’s a below-the-rim center with middling defensive value, but one who also doesn’t shoot a lot of 3-pointers. A highlight reel of Jokić’s scoring would just be a series of midrange jump shots and difficult floaters. It’s only when consumed in quantity that one begins to appreciate his insane accuracy on such a difficult shot diet.
Yet all of that is secondary to the skill that defines Jokić: his incredible feel for the game, particularly his passing ability. Those skills are so refined that he effectively plays point guard at 6-foot-11 and a listed weight of 284 pounds, and he does so as well as any other player in the league. Inconceivably for a player his size, he ranked third in the league in assists in 2022–23 while leading Denver to the title. In 2024, he added his third regular-season NBA MVP.
Let’s back up, though. The backstory of how a doughy kid from Serbia became the best player in the league is almost unbelievable.
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Jokić is the greatest draft pick of all time. Historically, nothing else in league annals comes close to the 41st pick in the draft becoming a three-time league MVP and NBA Finals MVP — one of only 11 players in history to say that. His arrival was nothing less than a godsend for a rebuilding Denver Nuggets team in a midsize market, and doubly so because he’s never hinted at even the slightest interest in leaving for a bigger, more glamorous city.
How did everyone miss on him? Well, it took a while for him to become the monster player we see now. As a pudgy teen in the small town of Sombor in northern Serbia, Jokić was just as interested in horse racing as basketball and was pushing 300 pounds while chugging three liters of soda a day.
He showed enough talent to eventually sign with KK Mega Bemax and move to Belgrade, and from there his dedication grew. As Jokić got in better shape, he carved out enough renown to receive an invite to the 2014 Nike Hoop Summit in Portland, Oregon — where he would be paired for the first time with a Canadian guard named Jamal Murray.
But Jokić scored just five points in that game (believe it or not, his team’s leading scorer was an already-forgotten future Nuggets player named Emmanuel Mudiay). Nobody left the gym thinking they had seen a future all-time great. At a time when everyone was looking for the next Dirk Nowitzki, Jokić’s pick-and-pop game seemed just OK, and his athleticism a glaring question mark.
In the 2014 draft, the Nuggets acquired another Balkan center, Jusuf Nurkić, 16th in the same draft and opted to keep Jokić in Serbia to develop.
Jokić erupted that season, becoming the Adriatic League’s MVP in 2014-15, and he never looked back. The Nuggets signed him the following year, and he was a rotation player immediately, cracking the 2015-16 NBA All-Rookie team.
However, it was still a bumpy road to his eventual superstardom. For starters, it took nearly two seasons for the Nuggets to truly realize what they had in Jokić. Denver had another young, productive center in Nurkić, and his more traditional game was easier to fit into a standard game plan. It wasn’t until the Nuggets’ stumbling start to the 2016-17 season that they decided to fully commit to Jokić.
That date — December 15, 2016 — is known as “Jokmas” around Denver. From there, everything snowballed like a Rocky Mountain avalanche. Nurkić was traded later in the season, while Jokić’s star rapidly ascended … as did that of the Nuggets.
“I’m talking to myself,” Nuggets coach Michael Malone said. “This kid was NBA All-Rookie as a center and here I am bringing him off the bench and playing him as a four and a five. And I said, ‘Screw everything.’ Nikola’s a center. He’s our center. And the next game, I started him at center. From that point in time, our offense, our team, our winning, everything just went straight up.
“I made a decision that he would become the focal point of everything we do, every decision we make, every player we bring in has to be somebody that can play with and complement Nikola.”
“Now knowing what this means,” Malone said, “it was just a truly defining moment in this franchise’s history because I think everything at that point in time changed, and changed for the better.”
There would still be growing pains along the way: A 2018 season-finale defeat in Minnesota kept the Nuggets out of the playoffs despite a 46-win season. A disappointing Game 7 loss to Portland in the second round in 2019 caused some doubt and consternation about Denver’s playoff ceiling.
And after an encouraging run to the 2020 Western Conference finals, featuring a second-round upset of the Clippers where they came back from a 3-1 deficit, injuries to Murray and Michael Porter Jr. set the Nuggets back for two more seasons.
Nonetheless, Jokić’s progress as a player emboldened the Nuggets to try things that hadn’t been done before. With his superior passing skill, they began leaning on him more to be a “point center” — often orchestrating the offense from the perimeter before moving closer to the basket for a shot attempt.
In 2021, he became just the third player in NBA history to finish a season ranked in the top five in points, rebounds, and assists, winning his first MVP award while leading the Nuggets to 47 wins and the second round of the playoffs.
In 2022, he doubled down on that effort, winning the award again while leading the Nuggets to 48 wins despite Murray and Porter both missing nearly the entire season.
Throughout his evolution, Jokić gained increasing renown for his elite passing skill. First, some began to wonder if he was the best passing big man ever. As his accomplishments increased, that “big” qualifier gradually faded. The Joker’s exploits as a passer take a back seat to nobody who has ever played the game.
“He sees plays before they happen,” Los Angeles Lakers star LeBron James said of Jokić. “Maybe it’s not talked about, because a lot of people don’t understand it, but I do. He’s special.”
Still in his 20s, he’s already built a collection of some of the most mind-boggling passes of all time. One particular specialty is standing on the right elbow, staring at a teammate in the right corner as if to initiate a dribble handoff and then whipping a no-look pass across his body to the left corner just as a cheating weak-side defender commits.
His ability to make one-handed outlet passes is equally legendary, as well as his occasional “water polo” passes — faking a pass with one hand, bringing it back, and then quickly throwing it someplace else — that mimic the motion of the game he played recreationally in his youth.
Jokić also has a special ability to hit cutters who don’t even seem to be open, by dropping pinpoint passes over and around defenders, almost like an NFL quarterback throwing a corner fade route to a spot where only the receiver can get it.
“He’s a genius, man,” said Nuggets teammate and friend Aaron Gordon. “He’s a basketball genius. That’s really what it comes down to. He’s playing it like it’s chess, seeing it three steps ahead.
“You’ve always got to keep your eye on him when he has the ball because he’ll find you. He’ll find you. Even if you don’t think you’re open, you’re open. He’ll pass you open, which is dope. It’s just amazing to play with somebody like that who can actually pass you open and sees the game [like that], and who likes to pass and enjoys passing.”
In retrospect, it’s amazing how slowly the appreciation for his game came around.
The NBA left him off of its top 75 list in 2021. Even after he won his second consecutive MVP in 2022, some didn’t think of him as an all-time great player.
That narrative changed in 2022-23, when he had the type of postseason success that had previously eluded him, leading the Nuggets, who had no other All-Stars, to the championship.
Overnight the narrative shifted, and Jokić received his belated flowers with widespread acclaim as the best player in the league. He nearly averaged a triple-double during the Nuggets’ 16-4 romp through the postseason, averaging 30 points, 13.5 rebounds, and 9.5 assists, including the game-winning basket in the clinching Game 4 of the Western Conference finals against the Lakers.
Through it all, Jokić seemed completely unflustered by his success, coming across as the working everyman who does this basketball thing for a living but would rather be in Sombor watching horses race and drinking rakija with his friends and family.
After the Nuggets won the 2023 championship, he famously asked, “When is the parade?” He then added, “I need to go home,” because his horses were racing that weekend.
Lines like that, and his self-effacing nature, belied all the work he put in. Jokić made a massive physical transformation, from the overweight teen to the guy pushing his rebounds up court and wearing out opponents in the mile-high Denver air by sprinting end to end for 40 minutes.
“He is a guy that works on his craft,” Malone said. “He’s not just a guy that shows up and does that. The amount of time that he puts into his game I don’t think is documented enough.”
Indeed, one reason Jokić’s passing skills became so deadly is that his increasing skill as a scorer demanded increasing attention from defenses. Defending Jokić is a conundrum for opposing coaches — he scores so efficiently from the post that you can’t possibly leave him one-on-one, but he’s such a good passer that you can’t possibly double-team him.
His efficiency as a short-range shot-maker is unprecedented. Jokić shot over 60 percent on 2s four straight seasons, including 67.5 percent in 2022-23 and 62.6 percent in 2023-24, despite barely a quarter of his shot attempts coming at the rim in each season. His 70.1 True Shooting Percentage in 2022-23 is easily the highest ever by a player who took at least 12 field-goal attempts per game; he tried 17.
In the 2023 playoff run, only 15 percent of his shot attempts were at the rim, yet he shot 63.6 percent on 2-pointers — the exact shots modern basketball theory says defenses should be forcing the other team to take. Jokić turns that logic completely on its head. Let him take those shots, and he’ll destroy you.
So far Jokić has made six All-Star teams, six All-NBA teams (including four first teams), and been an NBA Finals MVP. He led the league in PER, BPM, and win shares in four straight seasons, and his 32.85 PER mark in 2021-22 is the highest in NBA history. He also has four of the top six BPM marks ever, including the top entry on the list with his 13.72 in 2021-22. He could retire tomorrow and have the résumé of an all-time great.
However, what makes his dominance so jarring is its simplicity. Jokić is a brilliant passer who sees gaps others don’t, but his underlying ethos is that he doesn’t force anything and makes the right play, over and over and over again.
“When I’m playing offense, I just look for defensive mistakes,” Jokić said. “Are they going to make a mistake, or what are they going to do?
“To be honest, I’m playing the same way since my days in Sombor, I think. I didn’t change. Maybe I upgraded a little bit, but I didn’t change my style of play since day one.”
Career NBA stats (through 2023-24): G: 675, Pts.: 20.9, Reb.: 10.7, Ast.: 6.9, Win Shares: 111.6, PER: 28.1
Achievements: NBA MVP (’21, ’22, ‘24), Six-time All-NBA, Six-time NBA All-Star, NBA champ (’23), Finals MVP (’23), Western Conference Finals MVP (’23)
Excerpted from “The Basketball 100” published by William Morrow. Copyright © 2024 by The Athletic Media Company. Reprinted courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photo: Jed Jacobsohn / Getty Images)
