Positionally, Nikola Jokic is arguably the best passer in the NBA
By Max Carlin
Nikola Jokic is a highlight factory for the Denver Nuggets, but his consistent excellence has made him one of the best passers in the NBA.
With 1:29 remaining in the first half of the Denver Nuggets‘ first preseason game against the Golden State Warriors, Nikola Jokic did it.
He did the thing he has made so remarkably commonplace: He took our collective breath away.
Showcasing an unnatural amount of grace for a man his size, Jokic spun, and casually flipped a perfect pass over his right shoulder to a cutting Gary Harris. It was nothing to him, just another a play.
See for yourself. Look at how nonchalant he is after creating basketball artistry.
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Turn the sound on. Listen to the reaction at Oracle Arena, the NBA’s most hostile battlefront. Every single person in that crowd audibly gasps, because Nikola Jokic is pure magic.
Flashy plays like Jokic’s dime inevitably stick out. In many cases, they even allow us to mentally edit out the less spectacular plays, building players up solely based on their highest peaks rather than their baseline production. That’s essentially how Allen Iverson became the face of a generation.
When it comes to Jokic, though, the flashy plays can cause you to forget how consistently extraordinary he is. In fact, positionally, Jokic may well be the best passer in the NBA already.
In the modern NBA, we increasingly see players bunched into more amorphous categories than the traditional five positional groupings, so I divided all NBA players into three positional groups.
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For my purposes, I used Basketball-Reference’s positional designations of guard, forward and center. I compiled lists of the 100 leaders in minutes played for each positional designation in 2016-17. For centers, I only included those who played at least 1,000 minutes, as all the guards and forwards considered totaled at least 1,000 minutes.
I then messed around in Excel, calculating positional averages for assist percentage. I prefer assist percentage to other measures of assists because it is not cumulative, meaning that it does not discriminate against players who play fewer minutes, nor is it dependent on pace, so it is a rather standardized metric. Therefore, in the diverse NBA climate, assist percentage is the best way to compare players regardless of situation.
I then calculated z-scores for all the players’ assist percentages. It sounds complicated, but I promise it’s not. A z-score is a measure of how many standard deviations from the mean a case is. In less technical terms, it’s a standardized measure of how much better than average something is.
Standardization is the key, though. Given that the average guard has an assist percentage of 20.1 percent, a guard sporting an assist percentage of 25 percent is not all that impressive — he’s barely above average. Meanwhile, the average center has an assist percentage of 10.1 percent. A center running an assist percentage of 25 percent is remarkably better than average.
Z-scores allow us to see that difference in a standardized manner, which makes comparing across data sets (positional groups in this case) extremely easy. So, a higher z-score means more standard deviations from the mean, which means more improvement upon average.
Of all the players I examined, LeBron James unsurprisingly was the most above-average for his position (forward). Russell Westbrook checked in at second on the list, and third was Nikola Jokic.
Jokic was not his team’s primary ball-handler, nor did he initiate offense every time down the court like James and Westbrook, but he was right up there among the league’s leaders in positional proficiency.
Simply put: Nikola Jokic is a transcendent passer. Among big men, he seriously is up there with Bill Russell, Arvydas Sabonis, and Bill Walton. I mean, watch some of these highlights. It’s nothing short of comical how good this guy is.
And best of all, he does this constantly.
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Tune into a random Nuggets game on a cold Thursday in January, and you’ll see a basketball genius doing the remarkable, all the while acting as if it’s nothing. Even at 22 years old, it’s no surprise the Joker is already quite possibly the best passing center in the NBA.