Texas Chuck wrote:tsherkin wrote: Evsn if Jokic is kinda getting 95 Robinson'd.
The Jokic standards are approaching Lebron levels. Where you have to make every shot and win every game or you are trash.
What are we even doing?
Are we describing what has been happening as Jokic merely failing to win and failing to make every shot? Or is the observation more to do with bad and exploitable defence and a potential tendency to offensive passivity, both of which have been discussed long before this exact moment?
Has he played the best two games of his career? No. Has he been terrible like everyone wants to hot take? Not even close. Sometimes the other team is just really good and plays really well too.
Much like Robinson actually got the best of Dream over their careers but this board used to insist otherwise based on one series before I actually did the research and it showed how clear the advantage was to Robinson. But narratives take hold and very few people are willing to change their mind.
So back to gesturing at a perceived regular season advantage being more meaningful than what happens in the postseason?
Jokic’s regular season impact has rarely translated to the postseason. That gets hidden behind small samples and extenuating circumstances, but the more that sample increases, and the more people want to argue that the strong performances of support players like Jamal Murray actually do not matter, then the more valid it becomes for us to look at a player who had been an on-court negative (in a literal plus/minus sense) for nearly half of his career series (6-8).
We have posters on this board calling into question his MVP's because of 2 games. I know that's not you, but this burying of Jokic isn't for me. Still the best player in the world.
He might be, but in the playoffs it is a substantially smaller gap than has been portrayed, and much of the advantage is built around Jokic being a durable player — which is good, to be clear, but is the same sort of approach that will get people to grumble when you call Tatum a better postseason player than Kawhi because the latter can almost never hold up through two rounds.