Nikola Jokić is MVP yet again. So why are his Nuggets struggling in

Nikola Jokić continues to wind his way into the inner circle of the greatest basketball players ever. The Denver Nuggets’ otherworldly center won his third league MVP award on Wednesday night. He is just the ninth player to achieve that feat in the NBA, an achievement that usually ends with players – LeBron, Jordan, Magic, Wilt – becoming mononyms. Had Jokić finished one place higher in the voting in 2023, when he finished second to the Philadelphia 76ers’ Joel Embiid, he would now be the only player to win the award four years in succession. Last year, he led the Nuggets, a historically mediocre franchise, to their first NBA championship.

At this stage in his career, it is difficult to overstate Jokić’s excellence. The 29-year-old Serb is a marvel of consistency, dominating opponents nearly every time he takes the floor. He is a scoring wizard, a playmaking savant and a rebounding menace. He even makes his free throws at a rate of better than 80% each year while nailing about 35% of his three-pointers. In doing all of that, Jokić answers the question, “What if Shaquille O’Neal could shoot?” The 2015 second-round pick has gotten so mind-numbingly good that almost nobody even bothers to debate if he is the best player alive. By now, it is taken for granted.

But he may not be good enough to get the Nuggets back to the NBA finals this year. At the moment, Denver trail the high-flying Minnesota Timberwolves 2-0 in their best-of-seven Western Conference semi-final series. The first two games, contested on the Nuggets’ floor, were jarring. The reason for the jolt wasn’t so much that the upstart Wolves could win a few games, but that Jokić and his teammates looked so powerless to stop them from doing so. In Tuesday’s Game 2, a 106-80 final score somehow didn’t do justice to just how badly the Nuggets were beaten up.

Over the first two games of the series, Minnesota exploited the only part of Jokić’s game that could plausibly be called a…