A Premature Elevation

The mythical Best Player in the World crown doesn’t get passed around lightly. It gets taken by brute force from one champion by another.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Larry Bird. Magic Johnson. Michael Jordan. Shaquille O’Neal. Kobe Bryant. LeBron James. Each held the title for several seasons, and each is widely regarded as a top-10 player in NBA history.

It’s a mark only reserved for the elite of the elite.

For the past five seasons, the Best Player in the World moniker has belonged to Denver Nuggets superstar center Nikola Jokic. He led the Nuggets to the NBA championship in 2023. He’s finished top-2 in NBA MVP voting every year since 2021 and has won the award outright three times. Statistically, he’s posted three of the five most efficient seasons of all-time during that stretch, and this season became the first player ever to

lead the NBA in both total assists and rebounds per game.

When Kevin Durant said back in December that Jokic is arguably a top-5 player in NBA history, nobody batted an eye. When Jason Kidd said last week on the Dan Patrick Show that Jokic is definitively in his all-time top-5 ahead of guys like Magic and Bird, it was hardly even a footnote on the ESPN homepage.

And then it all came crashing down. When the Anthony Edwards-less Minnesota Timberwolves eliminated Denver in Game 6 of their first round playoff series, Jokic’s stranglehold on the Best Player in the World

title had all but evaporated. It wasn’t just that Denver lost, it was how they lost. Minnesota was down almost half of their normal rotation, including the best player on

their team, and they still punked the Nuggets. In fact, things go so bad in Denver that Timberwolves forward Jaden McDaniels spent the second half of the series telling anyone who would listen how soft Jokic and the Nuggets were defensively – and then punctuated it by helping his Minnesota teammates score 64 points in the paint in the Game 6 clincher. When’s the last time you heard an opponent speak that way about

Shaq or LeBron?

Jokic hasn’t just lost the Best Player in the World title; his entire reign has now been called into question.

In 2024, Jokic’s Nuggets blew a 20-point halftime lead in Game 7 to these very same Timberwolves. In 2025, they lost by 32 points in Game 7 against the Oklahoma City Thunder. This season, his team got bounced in six games by a Minnesota team without

their starting backcourt and two other rotation players.

Does that three-year run sound like something someone like Jordan would have put together?

But wait, there’s more.

Since 2020, Jokic’s playoff net rating is actually a minus-1.0. In fact, the Nuggets have been outscored with him on the floor in in six of his nine career postseason runs. Maybe that’s why he’s still only made it beyond the second round of the playoffs twice during his NBA career.

And that’s not it.

According to Basketball Reference, the teams Denver beat en route to their NBA championship in 2023 had a net rating of just +0.8, by far the lowest park of any modern era champion. It should come as no surprise then that Jokic still has never beaten a playoff team with more than 50 wins. For comparison’s sake, Kobe beat four 50-win

teams in 2010 alone and 25 such teams total during his NBA career. Jokic is still just 31 years old, so he has plenty of time to flip the script on this whole thing. But until then, let’s pump the brakes a bit on calling him a top-5 player in NBA history.