The Denver Nuggets and Los Angeles Clippers Series are the most attractive first round playoff series of the first round.
With two teams playing incredible basketball, it feels unthinkable that one of the Denver Nuggets and Raclippers will soon head towards elimination.
That means exit for the first round of either Nikola Jokic or Kawi Leonard. He’s both digging into doing everything possible to compete for his team.
Nikola Jokic has led the Nuggets to their recent victory in LA. His final shot was converted to a buzzer-beater dunk by Aaron Gordon in the final milliseconds.
Nikola Zhokic has been in a leadership role since manager Michael Malone was fired with three regular season games left.
David Adelman is an interim coach, but he acknowledges that he gave Jokic the element of freedom to coach from within the team.
Kendrick Perkins compared Jokic’s recent performance to legendary player coach Bill Russell.
And this comparison was also mentioned by Bill Simmons on his podcast. He said:
Simmons was attending the new Intuit dome for the LA Clippers. He considers Jokic’s performance to be the highest level he’s seen firsthand since Game 1 of the 2018 NBA Finals.
“He tells people where to go. At the end of the quarter, the Clippers get caught up in the underside of the basket, Jokic goes to the bench, calls for DeAndre Jordan, takes him from the bench and puts him under the basket he wants for an inbound pass.
“He’s always telling everyone what to do. He’s basically cooking food. He’s cutting food for everyone and feeding them.
“I was saying last night, that’s the highest level I’ve seen someone go in person since that LeBron 2018 game.”
Bill Simmons, who selected from the games he participated in, does not compare individual performances at that point, but is clearly a very selective, limited sample size, but still an interesting comparison.
LeBron James was fighting the tide and tide in the 2018 NBA Finals for the Cleveland Cavaliers against the Golden State Warriors.
In Game 1, he gave it all in the overtime game, scoring 51 points. A confused play from teammate JR Smith then changed the trend against the Cavaliers.
Nicola Zhokic hopes that his amazing efforts will ultimately be nothing as LeBron James’ Cavaliers swept 4-0 in the 2018 final. Game 1 was their best shot.
Jokic and Denver Nuggets are right in the series with home advantage in two of the remaining three games and levelled 2-2 with the Clippers.
But, like LeBron in 2018, if the Nugget can’t close it, his efforts will be in vain.