Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic makes unprecedented NBA history never done before originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
Nikola Jokic resides, yet again, in a realm never occupied before in the history of the NBA.
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The Denver Nuggets‘ all-time great center made that official on Sunday as the regular season concluded and he had his final tallies for the campaign.
Jokic averaged a triple-double, but that’s not even the history as he finished with 27.7 points per game, 12.9 rebounds per game and 10.7 assists per game.
Nope, the history is this: Jokic becomes the first player to ever lead the league in rebound average and assist average in the same season.
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It’s an astounding, unprecedented feat that for most of basketball history would’ve never seemed close to possible.
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There’s been a points-assists combo leader before, Tiny Archibald. Big fellas can lead the league in both scoring and rebounding at the same time, as a certain Wilt Chamberlain could certainly attest.
But rebounds and assists were never meant to come from the same player, except for generational talents like Oscar Robertson and LeBron James. And even they never led in both in the same season.
Jokic is a center in all the ways you’d expect him to be, except for the fact that he has the best passing vision and execution on the planet.
And then he averaged 27.7 points per game, too, just because he could.
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Jokic is a puppeteer, pulling all the strings and getting the Nuggets a good shot on pretty much every possession. It’s not wrong to say there’s never been a player like him.
He’s got an NBA championship, and in recent years Jokic has more and more proven to the whole basketball world that he’s going to go down as truly one of the all-time greats.
This unprecedented feat is just one more piece of evidence — an exclamation point, to be sure — on his path toward basketball immortal status.