Tyler Smith once played basketball at Penn State, and as a pro seemingly everywhere else. Gives him a wider worldview, one that is particularly valuable now, given the fact that a certain crew-cutted Serbian has turned the NBA playoffs into his own personal showcase.
It’s not that we didn’t see Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokic coming; he was, after all, named MVP in 2021 and ‘22, and finished second to the Sixers’ Joel Embiid this year. It’s just that everything is in sharper focus now, with Jokic displaying the full extent of his versatility while bringing his team ever nearer to an NBA title.
The hot-take sports world has predictably overheated as he has done so. While he was amid a 27-point, 10-rebound, 14-assist masterpiece in a victory over Miami in Game One of the Finals the other night – his ninth triple-double in 16 postseason games this year – ESPN play-by-play voice Mike Breen intoned that Jokic “passes like Magic (Johnson), rebounds like Moses (Malone), shoots like Dirk (Nowitzki).”
Even Breen’s broadcast partner, Jeff Van Gundy, couldn’t let that go unchallenged.
“You wanna check yourself?” asked Van Gundy, no stranger to outrageous observations himself.
Jokic, who goes 6-11 and 284 pounds, invites overstatement, in that he does all the center-y things – scoring inside, rebounding, etc. – and a good deal more. Often you will see him leading Denver’s fast break, and looking quite comfortable doing so. Often you will see him not only finding cutters from the high post, but throwing people open, like an elongated Patrick Mahomes. And often you will see him subtly creating advantages for his club, as is the case when he rushes to inbound the ball after opponents’ makes – and doing so, one NBA coach observed, “while you’re still bitching at the refs.”
“He kills you in a million different ways,” the coach told me, speaking under condition of anonymity, out of fear of getting fined by the league for tampering.
But the bigger point is about the international flavor that now permeates the NBA – how we exported the game years ago, and they made it better overseas. Purer. More collaborative. More beautiful. They did this through incessant instruction from the youngest ages. As our coaching source said, “They develop without position. They are all developed as five-tool guys – to be able to pass, dribble, shoot, read and react. It doesn’t matter if you’re 5-foot-8 or 6-foot-8.”
They also did it by emphasizing skillwork even after players reach the pro ranks. Smith, a 2002 PSU graduate who played 11 seasons overseas (including time in Holland and Italy), noted that European teams are not averse to staging twice-daily practices during the season, since they only play once a week. It was, he said, “like torture, because guys just want to play.”
The results are undeniable. They ship back to the States players like Jokic, as well as five-man concepts that have enlivened an American game that in the recent past has been bogged down by iso-ball and the like. Witness the Warriors’ style these last several years. And witness the Nuggets’ style, which is also heavy on cutting and rubbing and sharing. The significant difference is that while Golden State flows through a small guard (Stephen Curry), Denver flows through a big center.
None of this has been lost on Smith, who is now 43 and lives with his wife and three daughters in State College.
“When I was overseas, everybody loved the NBA, because they really saw it as these are the most talented, athletic guys,” he said. “That was everybody’s dream. … The funny thing is, now it’s gotten to the point where you ask who’s influenced who more, I think it’s clearly the European/world style that has influenced the U.S. more, which is kind of cool to think about.”
He recalled that his last year at Penn State (‘01-02), the Lions brought in a 7-foot German named Jan Jagla. The coaches wanted him in the post. He wanted to be out on the wing, firing 3s.
“And we’re like, ‘Dude, you’re 7 feet tall; would you just get inside?’” Smith said. “It was just kind of the way it had always been done. But he’s coming from Germany, and he’s like, ‘No, it’s not how it’s always been done.’”
Jagla’s numbers at PSU were hardly overwhelming – he made just 26 percent of his attempts from the arc, and averaged double figures in only the last of his three seasons – but he fashioned a long pro career overseas.
As for Jokic, he grew up more interested in training horses than playing hoops, as he once detailed for the Players’ Tribune. But eventually he gravitated to the game his two older brothers had played, and fell into the aforementioned European incubator. As a teenager, he wrote in that same piece, he was smitten by YouTube videos of “Magic because of his passing, and Hakeem (Olajuwon) because of his post moves, and (Michael) Jordan because he is Jordan.”
He came to the U.S. when the Nuggets made him the 41st pick in the 2014 draft – mull that a moment – and after shaving some gristle off a then-chunky frame began rounding out his game. Now he constantly puts defenses on the horns of a dilemma, as the Heat is discovering in a series that resumes tonight. Do you double him or single him? Do you make him a scorer or a passer? Our coaching source said that while Jokic is obviously effective doing both, it is almost better for the opponent when he is looking for his own, given how readily he involves everyone else. (Witness Game One, when he took exactly one shot while handing out six assists in the first quarter, enabling Denver to build a 29-20 lead.)
“He’s a savant,” our source said. “He sees things two passes ahead, two beats ahead. And the other thing he does, because his passing is so elite, people are cutting. People are moving. They know if they move to the right places, they’re going to get the ball. And that’s a very un-NBA thing.”
Jokic’s chemistry with veteran guard Jamal Murray is particularly sublime, but he creates opportunities everywhere, creates a flow like no other. And while that leaves us grasping for comparisons – I prefer prime Bill Walton, seasoned by a pinch of Kevin McHale post play and Nowitzki perimeter sniping – the best one is with Arvydas Sabonis, a Soviet center who remained overseas until the latter stages of his career.
The rare glimpses of the 7-3 Sabonis revealed that he was, like Jokic, an unusually talented player, certainly among the best in the world. (For proof, here is a YouTube video of him dominating David Robinson, Ralph Sampson and others.) But Sabonis, whose son Domantas now stars for Sacramento, didn’t make it to the NBA until he landed in Portland in 1995, at age 30. While he was productive over his seven seasons stateside, he wasn’t quite what he had been.
A pity, but now the basketball gods have favored us with his stylistic descendant. That’s a blessing, and testimony to international trade – how we exported a great game, and it came back even better. And in unexpected packages, at that.