The NBA’s career playoff leaderboard is littered with the names of the best players in league history. Michael Jordan has the points-per-game crown. Magic Johnson ranks first in assists, Bill Russell in rebounds, and Steph Curry in 3-pointers. LeBron James is tops in total points and win shares, while Jordan places second in both stats.
Inspect those leaderboards long enough, and you’ll notice another name that appears again and again at or near the top. Nikola Jokic hasn’t won any rings like those players (yet), but his offensive playoff stats place him alongside—and often ahead of—those legends.
Jokic has been at his best this postseason, leading Denver to its first NBA Finals appearance with averages of 30 points, 13 rebounds, and 10 assists per game; 47 percent shooting on 3-pointers; and a record eight triple-doubles. Jokic has six triple-doubles in his last eight games and, in another outing, scored the most points in playoff history in a regulation loss (53).
This version of Jokic is not an anomaly, but rather an extension of the star who’s shown up every spring for the past half decade. That reality might run counter to the (very foolish) narrative that followed Jokic during this year’s MVP debate—as if it were Jokic’s fault that his best teammate had been injured for two postseasons in a row, or that the Nuggets had to rely on a starting backcourt of Austin Rivers and Facundo Campazzo in Jamal Murray’s absence—but the numbers don’t lie.
So as he prepares to tip off his first Finals appearance, and as he pursues that first championship ring, let us count the ways that Jokic is already one of the best playoff performers in NBA history.
Do you like traditional stats? Well, among players with at least 2,000 career playoff minutes, Jokic ranks 13th in both assists per game (seven) and rebounds per game (12). No other player is in the top 30 in both stats. (Larry Bird is the closest, at 22nd in assists and 32nd in rebounds.) And Jokic is sixth in points per game among that group, for good measure, with a career playoff average of 27 points.
Add up all those stats—following the philosophy of Bill Simmons’s “42 Club”—and Jokic ranks second in his career playoff sum, behind only Wilt Chamberlain (who benefited from playing in a different rebounding era). The three players right behind Jokic are arguably the three greatest players ever.
Highest Combined Per-Game Averages in NBA Playoff History
What about shooting stats? Jokic excels here too, as he combines volume with elite efficiency—and better long-range shooting than even his most ardent supporters might realize.
Among all players with at least 1,000 career playoff shot attempts, Jokic ranks second with 57 percent effective field goal accuracy (behind only Dwight Howard, at 59 percent), and he ranks third with a 61 percent true shooting mark (behind only Kawhi Leonard and Kevin McHale, both at 62 percent). Jokic is fifth in that group in 2-point percentage and second in 3-point percentage. Along with Kawhi, he’s one of just two high-volume shooters in playoff history with 50-40-80 shooting splits.
And no, that last paragraph didn’t contain a typo: Jokic really does rank second in career playoff 3-point percentage among all players with at least 1,000 field goal tries. That placement yields some jaw-dropping comparisons. Jokic is a career 41 percent 3-point shooter in the playoffs; Klay Thompson, Ray Allen, and Steph Curry are all about 1 percentage point behind him.
(Elsewhere in Denver, Jamal Murray is at 40.5 percent beyond the arc and Michael Porter Jr. is at 39.6 percent in their postseason careers. Denver has the 2023 playoffs’ best offense for a reason.)
Jokic is a clutch shooter, too. He’s made 15 of 32 attempts in the last three minutes of a playoff game with the score within three points, according to Stathead; that 47 percent mark is tied for fourth among the 45 players who have at least 30 such attempts in the play-by-play era (since 1996-97).
And finally, what about advanced stats? In the offensive component of box plus/minus—a stat that estimates a player’s contribution above average per 100 possessions—Jokic ranks second, behind only Jordan, and one spot ahead of LeBron.
Career Playoff Leaders in Offensive Box Plus/Minus
In player efficiency rating—which aims to provide an all-encompassing measurement of a player’s value—Jokic is the career playoff leader, one spot ahead of Jordan and two ahead of LeBron.
Career Playoff Leaders in Player Efficiency Rating
Like his peers on these leaderboards, Jokic is excellent in the regular season, but he’s managed to get even better when the games count the most—which is saying something given that he’s won two regular-season MVPs and finished as the runner-up for a third this season.
That’s not normal. The average player loses about 1.3 points of PER from the regular season to the playoffs, according to an analysis of active players with at least 100 postseason minutes. This pattern makes sense, because the postseason brings tougher defenses and worse offensive efficiency overall. And this trend generally applies to superstars, too: Some maintain roughly consistent production, while others (like Joel Embiid and Karl-Anthony Towns) lose a lot of production, and only a few improve their production in the playoffs.
Jokic is one of those select few. His PER has risen by 1.2 ticks from the regular season to the playoffs, and his OBPM has increased by 1.4 ticks. Luka Doncic and Giannis Antetokounmpo are the only other current superstars who have exhibited the same level of improvement. (Luka would appear on many of these career leaderboards as well, if he’d played enough to meet my minimums; as is, he’s played only about half of Jokic’s career postseason minutes. George Mikan, a titan of the early NBA, also didn’t play enough to meet these minimums.)
The one giant caveat with all of these lofty comparisons is that they mostly cover offensive performance while ignoring defense. That’s a knock against Jokic, to be sure—especially when compared to All-Defensive honorees like Jordan, LeBron, and Kawhi. This isn’t an argument that Jokic is already one of the best all-around playoff forces in NBA history.
But his offensive track record suggests he’s well on his way to that pantheon, with a chance to glide even closer as Jokic and Denver play in their first NBA Finals games. When this many important leaderboards start with Jordan, LeBron, and Jokic in some order, the only possible conclusion is that the Nuggets center is a bona fide legend in the making.
