30 best personal rivalries in the NBA today
By John Buhler
In a league full of nice guys, there is still enough pettiness and animosity to go around. Here are the 30 best personal rivalries in the NBA today.
What has made the NBA so freaking enjoyable in the last handful of years is a.) the players are young and really talented and b.) they just don’t hate each other. Ladies and gentleman, the millennial generation of basketball superstars have arrived. They all played on each other’s AAU teams back in the day. There is way too much love to go around.
That being said, yeah, we do have some beef with a handful of guys in the NBA. Basketball is an underrated physical game. You will get beat up trying to grab rebounds in the low post. Occasionally, a dimwitted point guard might slap you in the face trying to swat that precious ball of yours.
But the beef is real, or semi-real, with a handful of these guys. The feeling may or may not be mutual, but nothing is better for our own personal entertainment than a bunch of giant dudes that kind of hate each other.
Some of these guys don’t know that they’re rivals, but they are. That’s what we’re here for, to tell them what’s up. Other guys, well, the hate is so real you can feel the heat from the friction burns when one guy tosses another onto the hardwood floor. Here are the 30 best personal rivalries in the NBA today. Coaches, you don’t count!
30. Nikola Jokic vs. Jusuf Nurkic
It’s totally underrated. Denver is a great American city, but 7-foot tall dudes stick out like a sore thumb. Therein lies the probabem with these two Eastern European big men. I mean, we love both of them separately, but not together. Definitely not together, because it didn’t work in the Mile High city.
One draft a few years ago, the Denver Nuggets doubled-down on some center action. Then general manager Tim Connelly didn’t know which Eastern European to draft. He ended up with Jusuf Nurkic in the first round and some guy with a Vince Vaughn physique in the second round called Nikola Jokic.
Turns out, you can’t have two Eastern European alpha males in the same frontcourt. Jokic became the Rocky Mountain version of Marc Gasol. Nurkic had to ride pine, knowing that his basketball skills were better served in a smaller, hipper, Pacific Northwestern metropolis.
So Connelly traded Nurkic to the Portland Trail Blazers for the best of the Plumlee Brothers last season. Nurkic made a small market big three with Damian Lillard and CJ McCollum. Jokic, Plumlee and the Nuggets missed getting swept by the Golden State Warriors in the first round. Forever now, Jokic and Nurkic are connected at the hip. They don’t hate each other, but are now division rivals. It’ll be interesting to see how their careers shakeout since the trade.