An Ode to Jokić

"The job is done. We can go home now."

Working class hero…

It’s hard to call Nikola Jokić “underrated” at this point, since basically everyone now agrees he is the best basketball player in the world. But being underrated seems fundamental to Jokić’s identity as a player. Even this year, he lost the MVP race to Joel Embiid for a variety of factors that had little to do with his actual play — he just doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who would win three MVPs in a row, so they gave the award to someone else this year, even though it was probably his best season. 

I’d love to pretend I was different, and that I alone saw Jokić’s value before the rest of the world. After all, on one of our very first podcasts, James and I explained why Jokić was such a great player/socialist icon, and why he deserved the MVP in 2021.

But even I still underrated him this year. Even though Denver had the best record in the Western Conference for most of the season, I still figured they would ultimately lose to one of the flashier teams, like Golden State or Phoenix or the Lakers. It was only some time in the second round, when the Nuggets were dismantling the Suns, that I suddenly realized, “Oh, Denver’s going to win the title pretty easily this year, huh?”

Since then, of course, everyone’s been singing Jokić’s praises, not just for how he played in the NBA Finals, but for his reaction to the win:

It’s very funny that in the NBA, a league that has been dominated for decades by players who seem consumed with a pathological and often unhealthy need to win — whether it’s Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant or LeBron James — that the current Best Player on the Planet has an attitude of borderline indifference to winning. 

But it’s not just funny: This man is a working class hero. Jokić is proof that you don’t have to love your job to be good at your job. In fact, you can be the best in the world at your job and still want to go home at five. 

Perhaps because he was raised outside the United States, Jokić does not seem fixated on his legacy the way almost all great American athletes are. When he notched his 10th triple-double of the postseason, becoming the first player ever to have 30 points, 20 rebounds, and 10 assists in an NBA Finals game, he was asked what that meant to him, and he said, “To be honest, not much.” And he didn’t say that in the disingenuous way of an athlete trying to deflect from his personal achievements. He really doesn’t care!

This is not the same as not caring about the result. Jokić obviously wants to win and he obviously wants to be good at his job. You can’t become as good without having pride in your work. But his explanations of his motives often go unnoticed. People hear his indifference to his personal legacy, and his indifference to awards and accolades and trophies, and they get confused, and wonder if he even likes basketball. 

But in fact, Jokić is a working class hero because he continually says he cares about winning for his coworkers. In his postgame press conference after winning the title — the same one where everyone focused on his hatred of parades — he made a point to run down every teammate and what they meant to the team. As he kept saying, winning a championship was a team goal and that was enough to motivate him throughout the season.

All this is to say that socialists ought to love Jokić because he empathetically rejects two founding principles of capitalism. First, that in order to be good at your job, it needs to be your entire identity. And second, that the motivation to be good has to come from individualistic concerns like money or legacy, instead of a communitarian instinct like solidarity or loving your team.

And he does actually like parades:

Finally, the NBA Draft is tonight, so I’m sharing one more time my proposal for how to reorient drafts in a more leftist direction: