2023

The 2023 NBA Playoffs began the same way every Denver Nuggets postseason had for the past several years — with the question of whether Nikola Jokic could lead a team to a championship without a traditional supporting cast of superstar co-stars. What followed was a 20-game masterpiece that answered the question definitively: yes, emphatically, historically.

Denver's path to the Finals was appropriately dominant for a team that finished with the best record in the Western Conference. They swept the Minnesota Timberwolves, then dispatched the Phoenix Suns in six, then eliminated the Los Angeles Lakers in four straight. At each stop, Jokic was the best player on the court, averaging numbers that no center in playoff history had ever averaged in combination. By the time the Lakers series ended, the basketball world accepted what the numbers had been suggesting for years — Jokic was not just a great center. He was the most complete basketball player alive.

The Finals against Miami presented a genuine challenge. The Heat had come through an 8th-seed bracket that required eliminating Milwaukee, New York, and Boston — three legitimate contenders — on their way to a third Finals appearance in four years. Jimmy Butler, the series' second-best player, was everything the reputation suggested: relentless, competitive, impossible to rattle. Game 2, which Miami won in Denver, suggested the series might be competitive for longer than expected.

Game 3 changed everything. Jamal Murray walked into Kaseya Center in Miami and scored 34 points in a decisive road win. It was the performance of a man playing with complete freedom — the kind of basketball you play when you've already survived the worst thing that can happen to an athlete (a torn ACL) and come out the other side with a championship. That game made it clear that the Nuggets had two players who could take over a Finals game, and one of them was already the best player in the world. Miami had no answer for both.

When Nikola Jokic dropped to the court at Ball Arena after the final buzzer of Game 5, the image captured something true about the man: he experienced the championship not as explosion but as arrival. No player in recent memory had deserved it more. The 41st pick. The MVP who didn't seek attention. The center who redefined the position. In the summer of 2023, in Denver, Colorado, the Joker finally got his crown.