DimesandKnicks wrote:Harry Palmer wrote:Two guys more noted for their strength/power at either end of his career (Moses Malone and Shaq*) described Olajuwon as the strongest guy they ever faced. Robert Parrish said bumping Hakeem was like bumping into steel. Honestly, this would not be close. Joker is a million miles ahead as a passer, so this is a better argument in 5 on 5, but 1 on 1 it would be a walk.
*he may have later revised that to Yao, though he was only specific re: unable to move him.
Some people still equate weight and chunkiness to strength
So first let me just acknowledge what Harry said. Players attesting to Hakeem's strength is meaningful and not to be dismissed.
To your point about strength, let's make a distinction between "basketball strength" compared to more general kinds of strength.
In basketball, when we talk about strength, we're mostly talking about what happens when players collide. So what's the physics of that?
1. Friction - the force that keeps a player from getting moved back the friction between his shoes and the ground. There are two ways to increase your capacity for friction generally: a) new shoes, b) more weight. Whether it's muscle or fat matters not. So when it comes to strength on defense, it's basically a thing that is proportional to weight.
2. Leverage - the relative positioning of two players is the secret sauce to why a player seems to tap into more friction than he should be able to. If the defender has his center of mass closer to the ground than the offensive player, then an unthinking offensive player will push the defender downward when they collide, which in doing so increases the apparent weight (normal force) of the defender and thus increases his friction. This is how shorter players can "stand up" to taller players.
Now, I would consider Hakeem something of a master at leveraging his body, and when it comes to his lower legs, well, the main played football before basketball, and footballers are masters of leg coordination. This to say, Hakeem absolutely has something here.
But none of this changes the fact that if two guys bump into each other in a purely horizontal interaction, the more massive guy is going to win that bump. Hence, any time we see a less massive guy appear to be bizarrely basketball-strong for his size, that apparent strength disappears when he isn't able to rely on friction.
So it's not a question of whether Jokic bumping into Hakeem could send Hakeem flying - he absolutely could - but a question of whether Hakeem can successfully make enough of those bumps happen at an angle that allows him to "cheat" with friction.
And so, with that question, I won't claim to have some precise answer here. I think there's absolutely room for debate that, frankly, I'd hope to learn from.
But 2 more things to consider:
First, while I call Jokic someone who likes to "bully" the interior, this undersells how much intelligence he uses when he does this. He's typically not just throwing himself into his defender over and over again like a hammer hitting a nail. He's more likely to actually throw his body into a guy once when that player isn't dug into position, which then opens up a gap which allows him to either shoot, pivot, or (irrelevant here) pass.
This to say that the "cheating with friction" approach to post defense, while it will always be critical to the job, works less well the more adaptive the offensive player is.
Second, I would suggest that the presence of teammates as help defenders really helps the post defender because it makes the offensive player avoid taking too long with the attack or venturing too far out around the defender. A player seeking to "man the barricades" against a bigger offensive player wasn't looking to hold out indefinitely, but rather just long enough to force the offensive player to settle for something less than his most preferred shot.
Consider 1v1 a situation where Hakeem is doing everything possible to barricade Jokic from getting to the rim. What stops Jokic finding space for a relatively uncontested shot from the 3-10 foot range? Probably nothing - no bash on Hakeem here who would do a better job than almost anyone and would make Jokic play to avoid the block, but the threat of a block in a 1v1 game even against Hakeem is probably not going to be as high as what Jokic faces in a normal 5v5 game.
And from there I think we need to take into consideration just how good Jokic's shooting is.
While shooting more from the 3-10 range than the other b-r ranges, Jokic has shot a FG% north of 60 for the past half decade (currently at 68.2 in '25-'25-26, but previous high was 64.3).
In comparison, if we look at peak Shaq, we're talking 45.5%.
So, in other words, the technique for forcing Shaq into a bad shot, still leads to a great shot for Jokic.
For Hakeem we don't have that data on b-r, but we do have a
study by legendary RealGM poster Dipper13 which tracked Hakeem in 58 games from '92-93 to '94-95, which is generally consider Hakeem at the peak of his offensive powers.
By my calculation, taking the second ring as the 3-10 range, Hakeem went 359/746 in that span. Good for 48.1%.
Technically b-r has him higher than that in '96-97 at 51.7%, but it looks to me like by that point Hakeem was living more in the 10+ foot range than the 3-10.
Anyway, good enough to say he was a better shooter than Shaq, but the gap between Hakeem & Shaq here was almost negligible compared to Jokic's massive advantage in shooting touch. I think that's going to loom quite large in the 1v1 matchup.
So large in fact that my advice to Hakeem would be to really focus on trying to get steals rather than thinking he can just make more shots while Jokic misses more. And I won't claim to know - maybe Hakeem could do just that - but I think for anyone here who thinks "obvs Dream" probably isn't coming in with a full recognition of how much better of a shooter Jokic is than Hakeem.
And then there's the rebounding, and Jokic being quite possibly the most effective Z-bounder (rebounding your own shot and shooting again immediately a la Zach Randolph) since Moses Malone. Unless Hakeem can go nuts with the steals, Jokic will be a better shooter getting more shots than his opponent. That's rough to fight against.
