“Assist makes two people happy. A point makes one guy happy. Simple as that.”
At the time of this posting (3/29/24), Nikola Jokic has 629 assists through the 70 games he's played on the season - good for 2nd in the league behind only Tyrese Haliburton. Of those 629, 114 are listed as assists to Aaron Gordon.
The ones that jump to mind are Jokic in the post or on the roll. Joker will either receive the ball in the post or Barkley his way down there, pivot, and generate an angle to get Gordon the ball in a few others can even dream of doing. On the roll, whether he's short rolling or coming off his patented 2 man game with Jamal Murray, he'll be headed downhill and Nikola, no matter where Aaron is, will launch the ball like it is a heat seeking missile and nothing else can stop it from getting to its target.
Here’s what I wrote about Jokic back in 2017 (my second Jokic video) and it still sums up the beauty of his game:
Nikola Jokic just genuinely brings joy back to basketball with his bamboozling but brilliant bounce passing. He can thread the needle every which way, and no matter how out of control and off balance he may look, he makes the right reads time and time again to deliver the pass perfectly. Whether it’s in transition, at the top of the key, from the elbows, or in the post, he’s a threat to make a play any conceivable way. The spin he puts on the ball stupefies. The Joker, as some call him, jockeys for position, boxes his man out, brings down the board, and if they have numbers, it’s already over. He’s got that spark of Sabonis, the dazzle of Divac, and Diaw, the wonder of Walton and Webber, the gift of the Gasols, Garnett, and Green, the nuance of Noah, the brilliance of Bird and Bogut (and even Brad Miller). If you give him a chance, he’ll outlet a lot like Love, as unselfishly as Unseld, or go primetime like Penny and sleight of hand his way out of a jam like he’s MAGIC.
The Jokic to Gordon link up is actually the 10th most successful one-player-directly-assisting-to-another pairing this year. 4 of the top 10 are non-primary ball handlers: Domantas Sabonis to Keegan Murray (4th), LeBron James to Anthony Davis (5th), Nikola Jokic to Michael Porter Jr (7th) and Nikola Jokic to Aaron Gordon (10th).
Sixth on that list is actually Jamal Murray to Nikola Jokic and outside of the Denver Nuggets, no team appears more than once in that top 10.
Of those 114 assists, two clips were unavailable. I decided to omit a few others just because there was little flow or I thought the assist wasn't necessarily warranted.
www.pbpstats.com/assist-combo...
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