Nikola Jokić
Nikola Jokić is a three-time NBA Most Valuable Player (2021, 2022 and 2024), the 2023 champion and Finals MVP with the Denver Nuggets, and the second player in league history, after Russell Westbrook, to average a triple-double in consecutive seasons. He was the 41st pick of the 2014 draft.
He is also the best passing big man the sport has produced, which is a strong enough claim to stand on its own, and he spends his summers driving harness horses at provincial Serbian racetracks, which is not a quirk in the profile so much as the actual shape of his year.
Sombor
He was born on February 19, 1995, in Sombor, a town of about 45,000 in Vojvodina, the flat farming province in Serbia’s north near the Hungarian border. He is the youngest of three brothers; Strahinja and Nemanja both went to the United States to play college basketball, and both came home. The family house had a barn, horses, and a cellar the three brothers used as a shared bedroom.
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He was not a prodigy, and the talent-pipeline version of his childhood that gets written now is retrofitted. He was slow. He was heavy. He drank Coca-Cola by the litre, which he has talked about openly. He did not get into the senior rotation at his hometown club until he was nearly sixteen, and he was not on any European youth-national radar until Mega Basket’s Belgrade academy signed him in 2012, at seventeen.
Mega Basket and the 41st pick
His two Mega Basket seasons, 2013-14 and 2014-15, in the Serbian first division and the Adriatic League, are what Denver’s scouts watched on compilation reels. The Nuggets took him 41st overall on June 26, 2014, eleven picks into the second round, out of a first round that produced Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Joel Embiid, Zach LaVine and Marcus Smart.
The pick was announced late in the broadcast. ESPN cut away to a Taco Bell commercial as his name came up, and the clip has followed him ever since. It is a real clip. It is also the cleanest illustration available of how completely the league’s scouting apparatus missed on him, and every team passed at least once, most of them twice.
He stayed in Belgrade for another season and did not report to Denver until the summer of 2015.
The first three Nuggets seasons
He debuted on October 28, 2015, against Houston, played thirteen minutes off the bench, and finished with a rebound and an assist. He made the All-Rookie First Team that year, averaging 10.0 points, 7.0 rebounds and 2.4 assists in 21.7 minutes on a team that went 33-49.
The second season was the one where the league started paying attention. Mike Malone moved him into the starting lineup partway through 2016-17, and he started 59 of his 73 appearances and averaged 16.7 points, 9.8 rebounds and 4.8 assists. Denver still finished 40-42. The combination was what stood out rather than any single number: centers who rebounded at that rate were not usually the primary playmaker, and centers who passed at that rate were not usually scoring near double figures.
In 2017-18 he went to 18.5 points, 10.7 rebounds and 6.1 assists. Denver went 46-36 and missed the playoffs on the final day of the regular season, losing a win-and-in game in Minnesota in overtime. The 2018-19 team went 54-28, took the second seed in the West, and reached the conference semifinals, Denver’s first playoff series win in a decade. Jokić finished fourth in MVP voting that year. He was twenty-four.
What do three MVPs actually measure?
He is one of nine players to win at least three regular-season Most Valuable Player awards. The full list: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar with six, Bill Russell and Michael Jordan with five, LeBron James and Wilt Chamberlain with four, and Moses Malone, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Jokić with three.
The names not on that list do more to explain it than the names on it. Shaquille O’Neal is not there. Neither is Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, or Stephen Curry. All four are inner-circle players. Three MVPs is a different tier.
Across his three MVP seasons he averaged 26.6 points, 12.3 rebounds and 8.4 assists on 57.7 percent shooting from the field and 36.1 percent from three. The scoring and rebounding are excellent and not unprecedented for a center. The passing is the part with no precedent at all. In 2022-23 he averaged 9.8 assists a game as a center, and in the two seasons after that he averaged 10.2 and 10.7.
What makes his passing different?
Most great passing runs through a guard who is looking down the floor with the defense in front of him. Jokić works from the elbow and the high post with his back or shoulder to the rim and the defense wrapped around him, which is the position from which the ball has historically gone out of the offense rather than through it.
Two specific things follow. First, a double team on him is not a trap, it is an invitation, because he can see over almost everyone and throws cross-court with either hand off one foot. Second, his gravity is created by the threat of a shot he does not especially want to take, which means the offense does not have to spend possessions manufacturing it.
The trade-off is real and worth stating plainly. He is not a rim protector, he has never averaged a block a game, and every credible criticism of his MVP cases has been about the defensive end. Denver’s answer for a decade has been to surround him with defenders and accept the ledger.
The 2023 championship
Denver won the title on June 12, 2023, beating the Miami Heat in five games. Jokić took Finals MVP and, in the round before, the Western Conference Finals MVP award as well.
The Finals line: 30.2 points, 14.0 rebounds and 7.2 assists a game on 58.3 percent shooting. Game 3 in Miami produced 32 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists, which was the first 30-20-10 game in Finals history. Game 2 produced 41 points. Across five games he took 96 shots and made 56 of them.
The supporting cast was conventional in every respect except its spacing rules: Jamal Murray at point guard, Michael Porter Jr. at small forward, Aaron Gordon at power forward, Kentavious Caldwell-Pope at shooting guard. What made it work was that all four of them learned to keep moving and keep their hands ready, because the pass was coming and it was coming early.
The championship was Denver’s first, forty-seven years after the franchise entered the NBA from the ABA in 1976.
The triple-double seasons, and the 2026 exit
The two seasons after the title were statistically the best of his career. In 2024-25 he averaged 29.6 points, 12.7 rebounds and 10.2 assists. In 2025-26 he averaged 27.7, 12.9 and 10.7. Both are triple-double averages across a full season, and only Russell Westbrook had done that in consecutive years before him.
Neither produced a fourth MVP. Shai Gilgeous-Alexander took it in 2025 and again in 2026, on the strength of Oklahoma City’s record, and the voting returned to a best-player-on-the-best-team frame after several years of weighting individual impact more heavily.
The 2025-26 season ended badly. Denver won 54 games and lost the first round in six to a sixth-seeded Minnesota, the franchise’s earliest exit in four years. Jokić averaged 25.8 points, 13.2 rebounds and 9.5 assists in the series and shot 44.6 percent, well under his career rate. Asked afterward about his future, he said he still wanted to be a Nugget for the rest of his career.
Serbia, and two Olympic medals
He has played two Olympic tournaments and medalled in both. In 2016, at twenty-one and a year into his NBA career, Serbia reached the final in Rio and lost to the United States 96-66. Silver.
Paris in 2024 was the better tournament for him personally. Serbia took bronze, beating Germany in the medal game after losing a semifinal to the United States in which the Americans trailed by seventeen and Curry made nine three-pointers to pull it out. Jokić averaged 18.8 points, 10.7 rebounds and 8.7 assists across the tournament and posted the highest efficiency rating on the Serbian team.
Why does he spend his summers racing horses?
He has said, repeatedly and without any apparent interest in walking it back, that basketball is the second most important thing in his life and horses are the first.
The Jokić family runs a harness-racing stable in Sombor. Harness racing means standardbred trotters pulling a two-wheeled sulky, with the driver seated behind rather than mounted, and Jokić trains and drives. He owns horses, he has raced them in Serbia, and the off-season is organised around the stable rather than around basketball. It is why he turns down most exhibition and promotional commitments, and it is the subject he answers questions about at length when he answers questions about anything at length.
Where the career stands
Through eleven seasons: 810 games, 22.2 points, 11.1 rebounds and 7.5 assists a game, 56.1 percent from the field. In 100 playoff games he has averaged 27.4 points, 12.4 rebounds and 7.7 assists. Three MVPs, one Finals MVP, one conference finals MVP, one championship, two Olympic medals.
He is already the best player in Denver Nuggets history by any measure anyone uses, and he is already in the top five centers of all time on the statistical tools front offices actually run. The open question is the top three, which means Abdul-Jabbar, Chamberlain, Hakeem Olajuwon, O’Neal and Russell, and that question gets answered by what the next four or five Denver seasons look like rather than by anything already on the record.
Mike Singer covered him for the Denver Post through the rise and wrote the reported biography, Why So Serious? The Untold Story of NBA Champion Nikola Jokic (Harper), which is the best single account of the Sombor years and the Mega Basket signing. What it gets at, better than the highlight compilations do, is that the thing everyone treats as a personality quirk, the flat affect and the total disinterest in being famous, is the same trait that lets him play the position the way he does. He is not performing indifference. He is genuinely somewhere else, and the somewhere else has horses in it.
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Related reading
- Denver Nuggets franchise history
- Triple-double records and triple-double seasons
- Every NBA MVP in order
- Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and the 2025-26 MVP season
- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Wilt Chamberlain, the centers he is measured against
Sources
- Basketball-Reference, Nikola Jokić career page: per-game splits by season through 2025-26, playoff splits, games started, awards (retrieved August 2, 2026)
- Basketball-Reference, Denver Nuggets season-by-season records, 2015-16 through 2025-26 (retrieved August 2, 2026)
- Basketball-Reference, 2023 NBA Finals series page, Heat vs Nuggets: five-game averages and totals
- NBA Communications, Most Valuable Player announcements, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2023-24
- ESPN, 2014 NBA Draft telecast, second round, 41st overall selection by Denver
- Olympics.com athlete profile and FIBA tournament reports: Rio 2016 silver, Paris 2024 bronze and tournament averages
- Sports Illustrated and Basketnews reporting on the 2026 first-round series against Minnesota and Jokić’s post-elimination comments
- Mike Singer, Why So Serious? The Untold Story of NBA Champion Nikola Jokic (Harper, 2024)
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