Nikola Jokic is a beautiful player but he is not my favorite player. He is not like Zion. He is like watching a chess player on the basketball court. That’s not to say he’s boring, but watching from four rows back in New Orleans the other night I couldn’t help but wonder if watching him was a little dull. I know, I know, I just said he was not boring but I think I may have been trying to convince myself of that when in reality I guess what I really wanted to say is that he is dull. My buddy J. just told me that the national basketball media thinks that the best way to fall in love withJokic is after watching him play 20 games. The logic, I guess, being, that after about that many games some kind of special aura becomes visible around him that is so undeniably worthy that it sucks you into its greatness the way a seductive woman might. Well I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon, but even if it did, that a pretty steep price to pay to start liking someone. But I do like him, he doesn’t miss, and he always makes the right pass, and the night I watched him play the Pelicans he scored a lot of points, hit the game winning basket, and had a triple double. Yet. Yet. Yet, yet, yet I found myself missing Zion, a player who works his way down the court like lightning in a bottle. Whose speed is so dynamic and unstoppable that it’s impossible not to feel like a five year old again while watching him play, and isn’t that the whole point? Look, I get it, not every player can be Zion. He’s one-of-one for a reason, I just wonder what the whole hullabaloo over Jokic says about the way we crown players as unique or special. Undoubtedly he is unstoppable, watching him play you can tell how much attention he gets from the defense. But I guess the issue is that you can’t feel it. You can’t really feel his presence on the court. Maybe I just have high standards or something, maybe I’m more of a Jimi Hendrix guy than <insert boring guitar phenom> guy, but there’s something about the physical side of the game that lacks in Jokic, or an old school player like Tim Duncan, and that kinda gets me down. I want my favorite players to fly over the backboard and make a no-look pass to the three-point-line, only to get the ball back and reverse dunk it over some poor schlep still trying to figure out where they are. Maybe I just come to basketball for the physical side of it, and a little bit of violence. Maybe what gets me hard is Kareem Abdul Jabar’s sky-hook, or Steph Curry falling away on on the three-point line and swishing the most acrobatic game winning shot a human being has ever seen. I could go on and on, but like Damian Lillard, I only have my time, and I’m certainly not prioritizing my version of basketball over any others, but in a world where time is so limited, where every day is another day toward the end, I want to see something that makes me feel like I have just witnessed god when I come to the game of basketball. It’s a heavenly sport and even though there is room for more cerebral players in it, especially players like Jokic who plays the game as perfectly as it has ever been played, I snore a little bit every time I watch him.
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