Whenever I think about Nikola Jokic battling Rudy Gobert, my mind immediately travels back to Game 5 of the 2024 Western Conference semifinals. On the night Jokic was handed his third MVP trophy by Adam Silver, the sport’s premier offensive powerhouse turned its most intimidating rim protector into a mailbox:
This was back when Minnesota’s defensive strategy was to stick Karl-Anthony Towns on Jokic so that Gobert could play center field. But on that night, Jokic went out of his way to embarrass that season’s Defensive Player of the Year. It was a real hammer-meets-nail situation. Jokic knew he could roast Gobert on demand, and in doing so he arrived at a stage of basketball nirvana—40 points, 13 assists, zero turnovers—that even his chief opponent could admire. “I just laugh,” Anthony Edwards said later that night. “That's all I can do.”
Fast-forward to right now: The Minnesota Timberwolves and Denver Nuggets are tied 1-1, with Game 3 on Thursday night. It feels like a moment of truth for both organizations, and largely thanks to Gobert’s stellar work through the series’ first two games, that masterpiece Jokic painted in 2024 might as well have happened 25 years ago.
According to the numbers, Jokic has been perfectly fine in this series. He’s averaging 24.5 points, 9.5 assists, and 14 rebounds per game and making 64 percent of his 2-point shots (Denver is also plus-10 when he’s on the court). But numbers don’t capture all of what the eyes can see, and right now, mine tell me that no individual has ever done a better job of guarding Jokic one-on-one than Gobert is.
Gobert has been a grade A deterrent, denying him the ball, cordoning off his comfort spots, speeding him up, and forcing one of the smartest players who’s ever lived to second-guess split-second decisions that are typically a formality. (According to databallr, Jokic’s on-ball percentage has been only 14.8 percent in these playoffs. During the regular season, it was 26.2 percent.) Against a slew of inverted ball screens set by Denver guards, Gobert’s managed to stick with Jokic on drives and cuts, bothering him at the rim without triggering a whistle:
Gobert stood strong and showed discipline in the paint, too, walling up instead of falling for an endless reel of post-move trickery. "I told [Gobert] we ain't bringing no double-team," Edwards said after Game 2. "You gonna guard [Jokic] one-on-one. Stop fouling. Stop going for the reach-in. Because he's going to flop. They're going to call the foul. Play him straight up." (For the series, Denver’s offensive rating with Jokic on the court is 1.1 percentage points below league average. During the regular season, it was 11.8 percentage points above it—an NBA best.)
It’s kind of a big deal if—and this is a humongous if—Minnesota can guard Jokic with just one person for the rest of this series. It sounds counterintuitive since he’s one of the most efficient high-volume scorers in the league, but coaxing shots out of Jokic is, broadly speaking, a recipe for success. As the motherboard of Denver’s offense, he’ll still be able to get teammates involved and generate open looks, but with Gobert holding his ground, the passing lanes won’t be as wide against Minnesota’s defense, which doesn’t need to double or even shift that dramatically behind the ball.
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The Nuggets can double down and continue to feed one of the most resourceful post scorers of all time, trusting that he’ll figure Gobert out sooner rather than later. But they also have myriad different options to work through—namely, the ever-supple two-man game Jokic has with Jamal Murray. Denver has gotten good stuff in both games when they set the screen high up on the left side of the floor, letting Murray get to his right hand with some momentum.
One example came late in the first quarter of Game 2, when Murray drove toward the right elbow a few moments after Aaron Gordon cleared it. The play ended with an easy dunk, but even if Julius Randle hadn’t made the mistake of stepping up to stop the ball, Murray would’ve still walked into an open pull-up jumper:
Denver can make Gobert work more off the ball by either setting wedge and cross screens that get Jokic closer to the basket or freeing him up with pindowns and flares out to the perimeter. That latter option is particularly important and has been sprinkled into Nuggets coach David Adelman’s playbook over the past two games. When Jokic’s gravity pulls Gobert out of the paint, Denver’s offense is less concerned with creating scoring options for Jokic and more interested in taking advantage of the openings it creates:
It might be an obvious suggestion, but the Nuggets can also play fast off misses to create mismatches that induce panic:
As incredible as Gobert has been in this series, there’s a real “can’t live with him, can’t live without him” quality to his minutes. Minnesota’s defensive rating was 97.7 when he and Jokic shared the court in Game 2. That’s god-tier resistance against the gold standard of NBA offense. But the Timberwolves struggled to score in those 21 minutes: Their offensive rating was (big gulp) 83.7. And when foul trouble sent Gobert to the bench, both offenses exploded, largely thanks to lineups that forced Jokic to defend in space—including one lineup in the first quarter that didn’t have Gobert or Naz Reid in it.
The energy Jokic expended in those minutes and in the pick-and-rolls when he was on Gobert—coming up to touch over and over again—was probably the reason he short-armed so many shots in the fourth quarter of Game 2. (Gobert entered the final frame having played almost exactly half as many minutes as Jokic, and it showed with two minutes left in the game, when he had a vicious putback dunk.)
It sounds like an insult to call Gobert’s recent success a revelation. He’s literally one of the most accomplished defenders of all time. But if you’ve watched these two stars butt heads over their careers, there really isn’t any other way to characterize it. Jokic has annihilated the Timberwolves (and Gobert’s Utah Jazz) several times over. Just that Wolves coach Chris Finch suddenly deemed this a preferable matchup is surprising. During the regular season, Gobert spent some time on Jokic, but his primary defender was Randle. My guess is that Finch doesn’t like that look against the healthy Nuggets starting lineup right now because the days when you could leave Gordon open behind the 3-point line are over. (Earlier this season, when Gordon was hurt, the Wolves were fine with sticking Gobert on Spencer Jones or Peyton Watson.)
Back in 2022, the Timberwolves felt that with Towns at the 5 their defense could never reach a championship level, but more specifically, they knew that they’d be dead in the water against Jokic in a playoff series. Hence, Jokic’s existence helps explain why they traded for Gobert in the first place.
The irony behind Minnesota’s eventual toppling of Denver back in 2024 was that Gobert was functionally toast in the role he was originally acquired to fill—both then and in the previous season’s competitive five-game showdown versus Denver. Now, in the third installment of what’s become the NBA’s most hostile rivalry, this heavyweight fight hasn’t just featured one 7-footer repeatedly bludgeoning the other. Gobert is holding his own, and the fate of this entire series may hinge on Jokic’s ability to dominate a foe who, up until now, has never really made him sweat.
