Where does Nikola Jokić rank among NBA greats after another MVP honor?

Now that he has a third NBA MVP trophy to put on the shelf at home beneath his horse-racing medals, where exactly does Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić rank in the all-timer debates? Is he already a top-20 player? Can he get into the GOAT debate? What seems to be the likely endgame when we look back two decades from now?

It’s perhaps a rough time to have this discussion given how Jokić’s last two games have gone. But let’s pull back the camera, look at the bigger picture and ask how high a pedestal Jokić may land on when he finally hangs up his sneakers. Fortunately, I’ve got some tools that help us handicap this.

Let’s start here: In terms of ranking with the game’s all-time greats, Jokić is already kind of there. He won his third MVP award in four seasons Wednesday, bracketing a second-place finish in 2023, putting him in rare company with just eight other players to win the trophy three times. It’s not yet clear what would stop him from winning a fourth or a fifth, although voter fatigue has been an issue with other great players.

Having already dominated the 2023 postseason, this award serves as Jokić’s official coronation into the Pantheon. He only recently turned 29 and has played just nine NBA seasons, but in a hypothetical universe where Jokić decided to end his career tomorrow and raise ponies or learn to speak Minion or whatever, he would still have a strong case as one of the top 20 players in NBA history.

Beyond that, his accumulation of numerous other feats put him in extremely rare company. He’s notable for being the singular driving force behind a championship team, as in 2023, he became one of only 12 players to win a title without an All-Star teammate (and is trying to repeat that feat this year).

And unlike several of the others on that list, nobody in Denver’s 2023 playoff rotation had ever made the All-Star team. (Little-used backup center DeAndre Jordan was their only previous All-Star.) Jokić is the only MVP to never have had an All-Star, All-NBA or All-Defense teammate in his first eight seasons, and he’s about to make it nine if Aaron Gordon or Kentavious Caldwell-Pope don’t make second-team All-Defense.

Statistically, Jokić is also near the top of the mountain. While my PER rating isn’t valid for pre-1974 players such as Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain because the league didn’t track blocked shots and turnovers, in the 50 years since, Jokić has four of the top 16 single-season PER marks, corresponding to his last four seasons. The nerdier box plus-minus (BPM) stat gives him an even rosier analysis, crediting him with four of the top six seasons in the last 50 years. Jokić currently has the single-season record for both PER (32.9) and BPM (13.7), both set in 2021-22. And in the playoffs, he’s dialed it up even further, despite what happened the last two games against Minnesota: His 29.2 career playoff PER is the highest in NBA history.

So that’s the backdrop; Nikola Jokić is really good at basketball. (Thanks, Einstein.) But is his career better than that of, say, Stephen Curry or Dirk Nowitzki or Bob Pettit or whatever other randomly selected great player you want to name?

Fortunately, I have a tool for that. I call it GOAT Points, and I introduced and explained it when The Athletic published its list of the top 75 NBA players of all time in 2021 and 2022, a list Jokić was excluded from at the time. When I first made this list, Jokić had yet to win his second MVP award but was in the midst of an all-time season and ranked 44th in GOAT Points even then. Needless to say, his last three seasons have seen him rack up a mountain of other accomplishments.

In fact, when I updated the  GOAT Points list after the season for our Basketball 100 book (coming this winter to a bookstore near you!), after pricing in a first-team All-NBA selection and MVP award, Jokić moved up to 21st, just behind Jerry West and just ahead of Giannis Antetokounmpo. Winning NBA Finals MVP this year (which seems much less likely than it did a few days ago) would see him jump West; otherwise, he’d almost certainly do it next season.

(Antetokounmpo, I should point out, is the same age as Jokić and was also awesome this season; while he seems on a different career trajectory right now, it’s not out of the range of possibility that he might regain the lead on Joker at some point.)

What about when Jokic’s career ends? That’s tough to project, obviously, but given the ranges on the all-time leaderboard (see chart below) there’s a really good chance he ends up 12th. That would place him right behind Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant and right in front of Kevin Durant.

Jokić would possibly move into 12th at the end of next season if he had another near-unanimous MVP season; more realistically, two MVP-candidate-type seasons would likely do the trick. After that, however, there’s a difficult mountain to climb to catch Shaq and Kobe. He’d be 31 by then and would still need multiple MVP-candidate-level seasons to bridge the 84-point gap between Durant and Bryant.

Of course, I’m talking about ranking on my own rating system, but I do think there’s a reflection here of what real-life accomplishments gets a player into the GOAT discussion.

GOAT points isn’t perfect; it almost certainly overrates James Harden and Karl Malone and underrates Michael Jordan and Kevin Garnett, for instance. But in the bigger picture, the important themes for Jokić’s place in the debate holds. In particular, it’s easy to think Jokić could just sort of glide into a top-10 spot from here, but that’s not true. One thing GOAT Points doesn’t reward is “hanging around” years; even making the All-Star team is an extremely minor, borderline irrelevant accomplishment when you’re dealing with players of this caliber.

Notably, what the chart underlines is that, as good as Jokić has been over the last four years, he would need to do it for at least another four to realistically sniff the fringes of the GOAT debate.

Relative to most players at this exalted level, Jokić got a very late start on his high-end accomplishments, not even making the All-Star team until he was nearly 24 and only winning four playoff series in his first seven seasons. He’s made up for lost time with an insane four-season run that rivals that of almost any player in history, but his endurance at this elite level will now define how high up the board he can move.

For instance, Jokić’s four-year run still pales in comparison with the league’s Mount Rushmore candidates. LeBron James had an 11-year run of being First Team All-NBA and a top-five MVP candidate; Michael Jordan had 10 where he was in the top-three in MVP voting and First Team All-NBA, bracketing a two-year basketball hiatus.

Even the relatively brief (for superstars) careers of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson have Jokić beat on this front; both had nine-year runs of landing in the top three in MVP voting and making First Team All-NBA.

For Jokić, then, his place in history now depends heavily on how long he can sustain this run. Other things matter, too (like, um, championships, with a repeat currently under threat from the Minnesota Timberwolves), but longevity at the MVP-caliber level is the question that will hang over everything.

For now, we can say three things about Jokić’s place in history.

First, there’s an entire class of all-time great players he’s already left in the dust; any listing that doesn’t have him as one of the 30 best players of all time, at a minimum, is laughable. GOAT Points underscores this: He is now more than 100 points ahead of 30th-ranked John Stockton and 31st-place Elgin Baylor. I don’t think a reasonable person would conclude that either of those players can touch Jokić in an all-time ranking, even if he retired tomorrow.

Second, Jokić is very clearly on a trajectory to rank as one of the top 15 or so players ever. At this point, he’s pushing past the league’s royalty, gunning for guys like Oscar Robertson and Garnett on the all-time list while he tries to hold off Giannis and catch Durant.

And third, getting into the true inner circle of all-time greats — the Birds and Magics, the Shaqs and Kobes — is going to take time. Jokić definitely can get there, and adding fourth and fifth MVP honor would be an extremely strong argument in his favor. But to do it, he’ll have to continue at a dominant level well into his 30s.

(Photo of Nikola Jokić: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)