Longtime SportsCenter anchor Scott Van Pelt tried his best to sum up Nikola Jokic’s singular performance. Heck, he even had the three-time Most Valuable Player awardee on the other end of a remote broadcast following the Nuggets’ overtime victory against the Suns the other day. Yet, for all his exertions, he was nowhere near close to encapsulating his guest’s remarkable feat. To be fair, no one else could have. The 19,808 in attendance at Ball Arena — along with countless others in the comfort of their homes — proved to be too awestruck to describe with completeness the first 30-20-20 stat line in National Basketball Association history.
It was no knock on Van Pelt, to be sure. The league has been around since 1946, and has hosted a whopping 134,000 games in the last 78 years. There’s a reason not one of the 5,000 or so players in that span had managed to come up with at least 30 points, at least 20 rebounds, and at least 30 assists in a single outing prior to Jokic the other day. And as shocking as the development may have been, he was, perhaps, in prime position to hit the mark after continually flirting with the milestone as the king of advanced metrics in the modern era.
Not coincidentally, Van Pelt was likewise thwarted in a bid to inject some sense into the ridiculous numbers by Jokic himself. In typical self-deprecating fashion, he deflected any attempt to frame the match on the basis of his extraordinary — albeit seemingly effortless — play. Asked about his thoughts on the matter, he hemmed, and he hawed, and he finally said, “It was just that kind of night.” Asked if he could appreciate the gravity of his accomplishment, he hemmed again, and he hawed again, until he noted, “We have a back-to-back [set] in two days, so right now, I’m thinking of how to rest and recover.”
Simply put, Jokic won the back and forth with Van Pelt. Not for nothing is he the NBA’s biggest anomaly, dominating with smarts instead of speed, with skill before athleticism, with foresight and insight — and then, when all is said and done, content to stay on the sidelines as a reluctant megastar. All he cares about is winning, and he does exactly what is needed in the process. Make no mistake; voters who define what the term MVP is for the award can do so any number of ways. The flipside is that they can’t go wrong if they opt to just forego the banalities and hand him the Michael Jordan Trophy when the battle smoke clears.
Anthony L. Cuaycong has been writing Courtside since BusinessWorld introduced a Sports section in 1994. He is a consultant on strategic planning, operations and human resources management, corporate communications, and business development.
