DENVER — Like most of the all-time NBA greats, no player or gameplan can “shut down” Denver Nuggets star Nikola Jokic – a three-time MVP who’s again being considered for the award after winning it last season.
You can only hope to slow him down or limit his effectiveness.
Lakers coach JJ Redick acknowledged this on Saturday before his team matched up against Jokic’s Nuggets at Ball Arena.
“You try to limit his touches, that’s what it comes down to,” Redick said. “But he’s so big, he’s so smart [and] can really play angles well off-ball to get the ball. It’s hard.”
Redick added: “We have our gameplan and we think we can execute a gameplan. Doesn’t guarantee victory. He’s seen everything. I’m confident with the group we have.”
His pregame words foreshadowed what happened in his team’s 123-100 victory over the Nuggets on Saturday.
The Lakers executed their defensive strategy for Jokic – which was similar to their gameplan when defending Karl-Anthony Towns in their Feb. 1 win over the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden – at a high level.
The result was Jokic having one of his worst performances of the season: 12 points on 2-of-7 shooting – the second-fewest points he’s scored in a game this season – to go with 13 rebounds and 10 assists for a triple-double. Jokic also had six of the Nuggets’ 22 turnovers, which led to 39 Lakers’ points.
“There was a similarity just in terms of the messaging around what we were willing to live with,” Redick said of the gameplan against Jokic, comparing it to the ones against Towns.
The success of the Lakers’ defense against the three-time MVP started well before he’d even have the ball in his hands.
The Lakers tasked with guarding Jokic – primarily Rui Hachimura, but also LeBron James, Jarred Vanderbilt, and Dorian Finney-Smith – were physical with him as soon as he crossed halfcourt. And Vanderbilt even met him in the backcourt.
The goal was to limit Jokic’s touches, which the Lakers accomplished.
The box score doesn’t directly show the times the Lakers successfully fronted Jokic, forcing the Nuggets to go in a different direction with their offense. Or when the Lakers disrupted pass attempts to Jokic that led to turnovers or other Denver players catching the ball. But both happened often.
The Lakers held Jokic, who entered the weekend leading the NBA in frontcourt touches with 56.6 touches, to 43 frontcourt touches on Saturday. He possessed the ball nearly a third less of the time on Saturday (3.1 minutes) than he did entering the matchup (4.5 minutes) and held the ball for shorter periods of time when he did have it.
“The difference was really just [fronting] Jokic as soon as he crossed halfcourt and then just relying on that secondary defender on the backside to take away the over-the-top pass,” Redick said. “They got some of those cuts off of it. Also created some turnovers off of it and got the ball in other guys’ hands off of that when he did catch the ball.
“We executed that well.”
Once Jokic crossed halfcourt, his defender would front Jokic in the post – standing between Jokic and the perimeter player who had the ball – to prevent Jokic from posting up on the block/low post.
“Just [don’t] give him an easy touch,” Hachimura said of the defensive gameplan against Jokic. “Once he gets in halfcourt, I gotta be on him literally the whole time. It was a great gameplan and as a team, we did a good job executing.”
And once Jokic caught the ball in the low post, the Lakers not only regularly sent help and double teams, but were consistently intentional in how they sent help toward Jokic in the post.
The Lakers consistently doubled Jokic by having the second/help defender coming from the baseline – a tactic called “tilt”, which Redick and James ironically discussed on the second episode of their old podcast, “Mind The Game”.
It was their most frequent and effective strategy for doubling Jokic. Two of Jokic’s giveaways came after the Lakers sent help/doubled from the baseline and made weak-side help rotations.
This doesn’t include Jokic’s final turnover of the game, and the Nuggets’ 20th, when he made a bad pass out of a post-up against Hachimura while Jaxson Hayes was coming over on the baseline to help but Jokic made the pass before Hayes’ arrival. The turnover led to a Luka Doncic circus shot that put the Lakers up 117-97 with 4:15 remaining – putting the game out of reach for the Lakers’ first win in Denver since April 2022.
The timing of when the Lakers sent their doubles mattered. When they weren’t facing a mismatch with Jokic posting up a guard, the Lakers usually sent a help defender toward Jokic after he dribbled, forcing Jokic to either pick up his dribble, pass or shoot instead of having time to survey the Lakers’ defense.
Denver, notably, didn’t post up Jokic as much on the blocks via passes from teammates in the second half. He operated from the perimeter or elbows more often after halftime – a win for the Lakers since this meant Jokic was operating further away from the basket. But this also made it more challenging for the Lakers to send help when Jokic had the ball.
The Nuggets occasionally had success against the Lakers’ defense when they doubled Jokic, with Jokic assisting his teammates on open shots – especially when the Lakers didn’t send the second defender from the baseline or didn’t fully commit to double-teaming. Denver players also created their looks with the space the Lakers conceded to prevent Jokic from catching the ball or getting it in his sweet spots.
But the Lakers were mostly willing to live with what they allowed, leading to the Nuggets having their fifth-worst offensive rating (points scored per 100 possessions) in a game this season at 106.7, according to Cleaning The Glass, significantly lower than their season-long mark of 121.3.
“That was elite,” Vanderbilt said. “We talk about putting it together for 48 minutes, as far as sticking to the gameplan and even when the gameplan didn’t go our way, like when [Aaron] Gordon and [Russell Westbrook] hit some shots, and we didn’t steer away from the gameplan. We stayed with it.”
The Lakers were encouraged by their ability to execute at a high level in their quest to being a great team and competing amongst the league’s best.
“In order for us to be successful, in order for us to win ultimately long term, we have to trust our gameplan, we have to trust and be dialed in on attention to detail,” James said. “We have the personnel now that we can really lock in on a gameplan and really lock in and be super strategic about how we want to execute offensively and defensively. That was great to see.”