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Ghostly Athleticism And Everything Else: Nikola Jokic, Deconstructed

There's a case to be made that Nikola Jokic has been the best player in this uncommonly great rookie class. The best part is that he's still getting better.
Illustration by Elliot Gerard

This season's rookie class could be something special. There is talent and depth, size and skill, and the promise that there could be a few transcendent players in the mix. Oddly, though, some elements of each player's game and physical presentation feel familiar. Rookies Deconstructed is a series that means to take each rookie apart, identifying the building blocks we know and the natural comparisons that emerge and appreciating how they come together in ways that are radically and invigoratingly new. Because these are rookies, with just a fraction of a season under the belts, some comparisons are necessarily forward-looking.

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Danny Manning And Athleticism Of A Certain Sort

Athleticism is usually identified and easily understood in a series of specificities—blinding speed, towering leaps, smashing through. But athleticism doesn't really work on a linear spectrum. It's more like a spirograph, and manifests most compellingly as a dizzying array of intersecting chords and curves. Few players of his era, or many others, embodied the offbeat pleasures of non-traditional athleticism as Danny Manning. Even before reconstructive surgery on both knees robbed him of the essential physical qualities that made him an era-defining college star, Manning was not an explosive leaper. He didn't run past anyone or bowl anyone over. His athleticism was about slippery control, maneuverability, agility.

Read More: Rookies Deconstructed: Devin Booker

The NBA doesn't evolve in concrete moments. The game is carried forward by a steady succession of players who are just slightly ahead of their time, which is to say players like Danny Manning. He was a mobile big who could post-up or face-up, hit a jumpshot, fill a lane in transition, or pick teams apart with his passing. After his (many) knee injuries and rehab, Manning still retained his coordination and vision. His footwork never got any less refined and he remained adept at slipping through tight spaces with or without the ball. All that kept him effective until he could no longer deal with the pain. There was never much that Danny Manning couldn't do. It was just a matter of him no longer being able to do it.

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Nikola Jokic is also ahead of his time, but there is also an athletic thread that binds him and Manning. Jokic has been a quiet revelation for the Denver Nuggets this season; his impact rivals the most impressive big men in this rookie class— Karl-Anthony Towns, Kristaps Porzingis, Myles Turner, Willie-Cauley Stein—even if his profile doesn't just yet.

Jokic is not as fast or explosive as those peers, but neither is he lumbering or oafish. He has exceptional physical gifts, besides the advantage of standing 82 inches tall. Jokic is an athlete on the Manning spectrum, controlled, slippery, agile, coordinated. His athleticism is not just in his quads and calves. It's in his hands, feet, shoulders, wrists, and most importantly in the neural pathways that connect them. Jokic doesn't stretch the status quo for what a man his size should be able to do. Like Manning, he just nudges it forward, ever so gently.

When they tell you the Harping comparison is a stretch. — Photo by Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Matt Harpring Was A Ghost

I loved watching Matt Harpring during his long and steady NBA career, which made it that much more frustrating that I could not, for the life of me, ever keep track of him on a basketball court. It's not just because he was white and tattoo-less and perpetually sporting a $12 Supercuts special of a haircut, or that he played on teams often loaded with near-identical players. Harpring had this ability to camouflage himself in the fabric of a basketball game, only emerging at the very end of a possession to hit a jumpshot or snare a defensive rebound. Whatever the essential magic was, it seemed like it always took my eyes about 22 seconds to find him.

I imagine opponents didn't have quite the same problem, or at least to the same degree. Harpring was a sharpshooting wing, albeit one who played mostly inside the arc in a way that probably wouldn't fly today. He was also something of a bruiser, and played much bigger than his size, often sliding up the positional scale on defense. For an opponent, it would probably be hard to lose track of Harpring when he was knocking the wind out of you with a screen, or doubling you over on a box-out with a forearm in the back. But I'd like to think he derived some functional benefit from his broader ability to blend in.

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Physically, Jokic is a blank slate, a big old Wooly Willy without all the wool. He's what the sketch artist starts with, before the witness ever starts talking. Jokic melts into possessions in the same way Harpring did, disappearing into a cluster of bodies, only emerging with a soft hook shot near the hoop or after a deft backdoor cut. Part of this is the nature of his athleticism, which goes to the Danny Manning comparison above. Part of it is just that Jokic's game is both splendid and subtle—nothing reaches out and grabs you until he's switching ends and your brain finally has a chance to process what you just missed. Jokic has worn out the rewind button on my DVR like no other player this season, not because I want to run back the excitement, but because I know I've missed something, and want to know what it was.

I don't know that camouflage and subtlety actually created an advantage for Harpring, but I'm certain it's one of the things that makes Jokic so effective. He has a butter-pecan skillset in a vanilla carton, and defenders are constantly caught off guard as a result. The ability to shed an opponent's attention and focus is a unique superpower, and Nikola Jokic is making the most of getting lost.

Whatever it takes, whoever you get compared to. — Photo by Jeremy Brevard-USA TODAY Sports

Lamar Odom And A Touch Of Everything

The NBA offers a thousand cautionary tales regarding players with immense potential, and innumerable examples of how they have failed to deliver upon it. From a basketball perspective, Lamar Odom falls into that slightly less interesting genre of potential delivering on about 62 percent of its promises. Odom was 6'10, moved like a small forward, handled the ball like a guard, and did enough big man things to make his versatility utterly viable. He was that rare basketball player who could literally do a bit of everything, and entered the league as a player with the potential to change it.

And he did, if never quite by dominating. Odom was never one of the 10 best players in the league, although his abilities implied that level of production was possible. What he was, until other demons took hold, was consistently good in the kind of jack-of-all-trades way that fans imagine for so many players and rarely get to see. He wasn't as great as he could have been, but he was great in every way his teams needed him to be.

Peak Odom happened during the Kobe Bryant-Pau Gasol-Andrew Bynum years for the Los Angeles Lakers. On those teams, Odom played out on the wing when they wanted to go big, and played up, next to Bynum or Gasol, when they wanted to go small. Odom and his defense, passing, size, and mobility were the cheat codes that unlocked the possibility of that team and its players. Without him, they would have been stuck in a box. With him, they could throw a box on top of any opponent.

Jokic is not quite that. He is not going to be sliding down to play the wing, and he will not be bringing the ball upcourt to initiate the offense, no matter how the Denver Nuggets future shakes out. But there is something Odom-esque in the way he operates from the three-point line in. Jokic is a handful in the low-post thanks to slippery footwork, feints and counter-feints, and hooks and flips that drop in from every angle. He moves and screens, and as a passer he sees and delivers on narrow seams of open space. He's shooting 36.9 percent on three-pointers, and a defender that let his mind wander towards contesting his jumper will soon watch Jokic drive past him. Jokic is a defender too, and potentially a very good one—he is already capable, in flashes, of controlling the glass and being disruptive with quick hands, piling up blocks and steals.

His positional range is narrower than Odom's, but the aesthetics are similar and the organizational impact is roughly equivalent. Last year's rookie sensation in Denver, Jusuf Nurkic, is spared the label of redundancy mostly because of Jokic's ability to guide a healthy offense even far away from the basket. He can space the floor or bring dynamism to the low-post or pick-and-roll game. It depends on what the Nuggets need, but there is no reasonable thing they could ask him to do that he isn't already capable of doing well.

There is a legitimate argument being made that Jokic deserves to be Rookie of the Year, even in this class of cannon blasts and fireworks. His productivity is extreme, but the visual experience is not. Jokic is smooth and stretchy in ways that are difficult to see. Don't worry if you miss it the first time around, he'll be here for awhile, showing up where right where you forgot he could be.