Fun Fact Friday: Nikola Jokic’s perfect game

Welcome to Fun Fact Friday, your new weekly take-free reading oasis. I’ve panned the mighty rivers of NBA stats to bring you the straight golden nuggets of trivia.

1. Nikola Jokic’s perfect game

In a Nuggets blowout over the Phoenix Suns, Nikola Jokic put together one of the more imaginative box score lines you’ll ever see. Playing a relatively small 31 minutes, Jokic went 11-for-11 from the field for 35 points, grabbed 11 rebounds, and dished out 11 assists without conceding a single turnover. (The only blemish, which somehow feels infuriating, is a single missed free throw in 11 attempts.) Obviously, this is like a mountain spring that runneth over with nothing but pure, refreshing fun facts:

• Just to start things off: this is the first triple-double in history with 100 percent field goals and zero turnovers. Keep in mind there are plenty of triple-doubles where steals or blocks, not assists, were one of the categories. Meaning it’s plausible that a big center could drop in five lay-ups and dunks, and collect rebounds and blocks, without turning the ball over. But that’s never happened.
• Jokic’s game qualifies for what I call a “Muggsy Bogues Game,” where a player has at least 10 assists and no turnovers. It is called this because, yes, Muggsy Bogues is the all-time leader in these kinds of games, with 46. (And if Chris Paul, at 34 games, does pass him, it will still be called the Muggsy Bogues Game.) Let’s forget about Jokic’s rebounding for a second: this was only the eighth time ever when a player had a Muggsy Bogues game without missing a shot from the field.
• Now we’ll forget about the triple-double entirely. Jokic’s game is historic because he made at least five field goals without missing any, and also dished out at least five assists without turning the ball over. This is only the 41st game where a player has done this. (Somehow both Zaza Pachulia and Andrew Bogut managed it, as Warriors centers.) Personally, this is the wildest fun fact I’ve uncovered in this entire article. I don’t think anybody, looking at a box score, would be completely amazed if somebody went 5-for-5 with five assists and no turnovers. But that’s rarer than a 60-point game.

2. First-game rookie starters

After most fanbases spend the summer getting hyped about their team’s promising new rookies, when Opening Night actually rolls around only a small handful of rookies from the entire draft class are even appointed as starters. It kind of makes sense: late-round draft picks don’t have much of a shot at getting the nod over the playoff-contending team they joined, and the more raw prospects from the lottery will be moved along more slowly. (Hey: even Kobe Bryant only started six games as a rookie.) This year there were five rookies who started on Opening Night: DeAndre Ayton (No. 1 overall pick), Luka Doncic (No. 3), Trae Young (No. 5), Wendell Carter (No. 7), and, of course, Bruce Brown (No. 42).

Alright, so one of those things is not like the others. Brown — who is on the Detroit Pistons — played in place of Reggie Bullock, and it did not go very well. Brown went 0-for-3 and collecting four fouls in 19 minutes. Which is probably why second-round rookies don’t start the first game of the season very often.

I looked to see if this had ever happened before, anticipating that it would never happen in the modern, draft-savvy era. In truth, it happens all the time. Actually, it’s happened once in each of the last two seasons, with Dwayne Bacon starting the Hornets’ first three games last year, and Andrew Harrison getting a team-high 38 minutes for the Grizzlies the year before that. On top of this, there are plenty of internationally established players who made the Opening Night debut as, technically, a second-round pick or even undrafted player, like Bojan Bogdanovic or Milos Teodosic.

The only thing that can get my attention next is when a domestic undrafted player starts on Opening Night, in the year right after their last college season. The last time this happened was with Don Nelson’s Warriors in 2008-09. Nelson started DeMarcus Nelson for the first five games, then he brought him off the bench for eight games, and two months after that Opening Night start, his NBA career was over.

3. Early Julius Randle record watch

I think one of the reasons that the good teams in this league are so good is that they can pick up almost-free talent by taking players who were starters on other teams and convert them into efficient bench weapons. The most improbable — and thus also the best — example has to be JaVale McGee’s two-year run with the Warriors. Would JaVale average 20 points per game if Golden State let him play for 36 minutes a night? Uh, no. But the Warriors only had to play him 9.5 minutes per night, and he scored at the same rate as that 20 point-per-game juggernaut.

It could be a sign that the Pelicans have matured into a serious contender, because they have done the same trick of shrinking-minutes/expanding-impact with Julius Randle. Randle’s 23.3 minutes per game average so far would be a full-season career low. Everything about his game has been a career-best, though, with his scoring rate jumping by 7 points per 100 possessions from his already-capable rate last year. Randle isn’t boosting his numbers with an unsustainable small-sample-size field goal percentage, either, as he’s already locked in at the same 55 percent he shot last year. The two main differences: he’s been allowed to let it fly from behind the arc, and he’s basically stopped passing the ball.

Randle’s raw scoring average is 18.7 points per game across those 23.3 minutes. This puts him within striking distance of the league’s highest-ever scoring average in under 25 minutes per game. That belongs to Freeman Williams, who dropped 19.3 points in 24.1 minutes per game in just his third NBA season. (Somehow, Williams only played in three additional seasons after that.) Of course, there are two ways Randle could be eliminated from the chase: his white-hot scoring drops off, or he starts to get too many minutes. Either way, it just feels like somebody will crack this record in the next few seasons.

4. What happened to the era of rest?

When the Spurs won the 2014 championship without a single player averaging over 30 minutes a night, it looked like a new era — full of deep benches and well-rested stars — was upon us. Well, that era might already be over: every team currently has a player who is averaging above the 30-minute mark.

Alright, alright: so maybe this is a function of small sample sizes. Then again: wouldn’t it make the most sense for rest-conscious coaches to build up rest for their most important players now, a half-year away from the playoffs? At the very least, the time for rest is over in San Antonio: DeMar DeRozan and LaMarcus Aldridge are two of the league’s top four players in minutes per game, at over 37. (The Spurs’ last-place mark in defensive rating is surely unrelated to these guys getting so much play.) No Spur has averaged that many minutes since a 26-year-old Tim Duncan was forced to do it back in 2002-03.

5. The return of the 140-point game

Out of the 1,230 regular season games played last season, there were only eight times when a team scored at least 140 points (without the boosting help of an overtime period). This year we’re already up to three: the Pelicans dropped 149 on the Kings, the Warriors dropped 144 on the Suns, and the Mavericks needed pretty much all of those points to beat the Timberwolves 140-136. Oddly enough, though, five of last year’s eight games all took place before Thanksgiving, so it’s hard to say that the 2018-19 season is absolutely smashing the pace of the 2017-18 season.

Zooming out and looking at things a decade at a time, instead of a year at a time: the rate of 140-point games is absolutely exploding. Between the years 1995 and 2005, there were only three. Not three per year: three, period. The 2018-19 probably won’t be smashing any records, though. In 1990-91, which was just a few years before the start of the140-point draught, a 140-point game was basically a weekly occurrence, including a handful of games where both winner and loser passed 140.

I like these kinds of ebbs and flows in the history of the game because they’re a reminder: no matter how sweeping or permanent a new innovation in the game may feel, odds are it will be inverted by the next generation.