lessthanjake wrote:
Well but Jokic’s individual playoff performances have been really great. I think people tend to have a bit of a negative recency bias when assessing players’ playoff performances. When we first watch something, we’re used to thinking about little nitpicks—moments where you think the player could’ve stepped up more, games or even just quarters where someone else on their team may have actually been better, games where the guy simply wasn’t actually very good, etc. Over time, that stuff tends to give way and we remember better stuff much more, and so I think we should be careful to compare one guy with those nitpicks in mind to another where those nitpicks have mostly (though not entirely) fallen off.
In the last 5 playoffs, Jokic has averaged 28.9 points, 13.0 rebounds, and 8.0 assists a game, on 61.4% TS%, with 3.5 turnovers a game. His playoff BPM in that timeframe has been 11.6. And those numbers aren’t skewed by any one particular run. His playoff BPMs have ranged from a low of 9.0 to a high of 12.8. And his points/rebounds/assist averages have been 30/12/5, 31/13/6, 30/14/10, 29/13/9, and 26/13/8. For all the talk of his playoff defense, the Nuggets have actually been quite good defensively in those runs in the years where they’ve had a remotely healthy team—averaging a -3.0 rDRTG in the last three playoffs (negative numbers are good here). Of course, he also led his team to a title, with one of the most dominant individual playoff runs ever. And for all the prior talk about his playoff on-off not being great, after the last two playoffs, his playoff on-off in the last five years is essentially exactly the same as LeBron’s playoff on-off from 2009-2013 (they’re at +6.7 and +6.6). So, to me, I don’t think there’s really a fair knock on Jokic’s playoff performance individually. To the extent there’s a knock on his individual playoff performance, I feel like it has to be a bank shot by talking about the team’s success, which goes back to what I posted about in my earlier post.
So where would you rank him then? If everything boils down to bpm or ts% it kind of shoehorns the discussion and makes it more about being right imo than a willingness to consider other angles and context which I would say are relevant to the subject(such as defense and performance in big games and other things). I don't think those things being brought up is an attack on Jokic or people who want to argue for him here. It's just context.
