The team’s star, Nikola Jokić, stood by himself in June as the winning Denver Nuggets started to celebrate as the final seconds of the N.B.A. Finals ticked down. He drew the defeated Miami Heat players closer by squeezing their heads in his massive palms as he shook hands with them. He joined the audience in rhythmic applause a few times. His pale arms were covered with bruises, and confetti was twirling over his shoulders. His large nose, which turns a reddish pink colour as he plays, went back to its original hue. He cleaned his sweaty face with a towel that someone had given him. Subsequently, he was approached by ESPN reporter Lisa Salters for a post-match interview. Jokić had to stoop to hear her because he is almost seven feet tall.

She said, “Nikola,” and he nodded to indicate that this was, in fact, his name. Regarding the Heat, she remarked, “They didn’t go away.” “You have to accept it.” After praising his opponents, Jokić conceded that the game had been unattractive. The Nuggets had missed more shots than normal and, unusually, had to rely on their defence to win despite his effortless, gap-mouthed scoring. 

“You know, that’s why basketball is a fun sport,” he went on. It’s a living entity. It is not possible to predict what will happen. It was a universal truth—sports are unpredictably unpredictable—but it also summed up his strange brilliance. As one of the boldest and most inventive players in basketball history, Jokić gives the game a living, breathing quality that is both logical and unpredictable. He is the brains of his colleagues, who on the court merge into a single organism. Last April, David Adelman, the assistant coach for the Nuggets, declared, “I think he has the mind of all five positions.”

A basketball team is typically divided up into separate divisions. While waiting to be fed passes for close-range shots, the tallest guy battles for possession close to the rim. Wings and guards fly about the playing field, passing, dribbling and attempting longer shots. Jokić possesses all these abilities. He can also take the ball on a handoff outside the three-point arc, drive toward the basket, and, while misrouting defenders with his eyes, sling the ball across the floor to a player who has materialized in the corner. In one motion, he can snatch a defensive rebound and, on the other end of the floor, toss an overhand pass to a player sprinting towards the hoop. He sends the ball to meet his teammates since he knows where they will be before they do.

In the past two decades, the N.B.A. has implemented rules limiting certain defensive tactics; coaches, meanwhile, have become savvier about which shots lead to the most points, and how best to generate them. The game has grown faster, and the players have spread out to cover more of the court—the words of the day are “pace” and “space.” Commentators on basketball also refer to “reading the floor,” which is a colloquial term for figuring out how players are shifting and coordinating a coordinated move in response.

Jokić is a master of this new geometry. LeBron James remarked, “He sees plays before they happen,” following the Nuggets’ rout of the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. (James correctly pointed out that he also does.) 

More than once, in a big moment, Jokić has recognized an elaborate play that the other team is about to run, based on the arrangement of its players, then quickly instructed his teammates on how to break it up. And he is endlessly adaptable. In the opening game of the finals, he attempted few shots in the first half but had ten assists, and the Nuggets had a seventeen-point lead. He finished with twenty-seven points as Denver easily won the game. Jokić’s movements are not silky, exactly—his shooting form is more sea lion than Steph Curry—and yet he plays the way water moves across rocks, finding the path of least resistance, even when that path is hard for others to see.How Nikola Jokić became the best basketball player in the world