Ohhhh, I can feel your burning anger through the screen at the headline.
I get it. I felt the same way when I started asking the question.
Come on. Shaquille O’Neal was Shaq! He was the Most Dominant Ever and won three titles.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was the NBA’s All-Time Leading scorer for 30 years and won six titles.
Tim Duncan, the Big Fundamental, 19 years of almost nothing but 50-win seasons and five titles, great from start to finish.
Hakeem Olajuwon was The Dream and won two titles. He was an unparalleled force in terms of offense, defense, longevity, and availability.
How about Wilt Chamberlain? Scored 100. Routinely put up 50 boards. Won two titles.
What about Bill Russell? The Greatest Defensive Player of All Time. ELEVEN titles. 5-time MVP.
Big men dominated and ruled the land for close to 30 years.
Is Jokic really above them all?
I’ll make the case for it, and then we can decide if it holds up.
The case for Nikola Jokic
Instead of tearing down legendary players who shaped the history of the league, I’m going to try and just rely on Jokic’s strengths.
Jokic is the best passing big man of all time, and it is laughably, incomprehensibly not close.
He is second all-time among centers and third among power forwards and centers combined, behind only Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Karl Malone, who both played 700 or more games than he currently has.
He should pass both next season if healthy.
But not all assists are equal, either. Jokic doesn’t just have the most assists; his ability to shape the floor is rarely matched in NBA history. If you want to make the argument for Magic Johnson, Oscar Robertson, or LeBron James, those are really the only passers you can put in his stratosphere, and James honestly didn’t find the angle Jokic does as consistently and routinely.
Jokic is 64th all-time in rebounds among centers and power forwards, 32nd in rebounds per game. He’ll likely move up those lists since he’s been averaging 12 or more per game over the last four seasons.
Jokic is already 14th in total points all-time among centers. He’s 13th in points per game behind Hakeem Olajuwon. But wait, there’s more!
Only four big men have averaged 20 or more points per game on 55 percent shooting or better: Kareem, Shaq, Amar’e Stoudemire, and Jokic.
Of those players, Jokic is tied with Shaq in rebounds per game for second behind Kareem and of course, is the only one to average more than five dimes per game.
I’m not even going to get into the added context of stats like effective field goal percentage or true shooting percentage which factor 3s and free throws because of historical context.
Would Shaq have shot 3s in the modern era? Probably not, he didn’t need to.
But if you need a 3, Jokic can make them at a high rate.
Win Shares are a cumulative stat; you only get so many per season. Jokic is already fourth among big men behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Shaq, and Dwight Howard.
He’s the career Box Plus-Minus leader, which isn’t a surprise. That stat rewards box score contributions outside of the positional norms, so a center who passes like Jokic does completely breaks the system.
(Assists are actually part of the Defensive Box Plus-Minus formula because of a weird formula quirk, which is a big reason I disregard that stat for Jokic.)
PER is no longer en vogue and rewards shot attempts and rebounding, so yes, Joker is the all-time big-man leader there, too. It’s still wild that he’s not just ahead but ahead by a pretty big margin over Shaq.
So yeah, the stats are pretty good.
He only has one title. But let’s look at what he’s accomplished if we move beyond just titles.
He led a team to the conference finals as a 24-year-old in the bubble. He led his team to the playoffs every year from 2019 onward, despite not having Jamal Murray in 2021 and not having Murray or Michael Porter Jr. in 2022.
But the best case for Jokic is about how he shapes the game. Shaq dominated physically. Hakeem outmaneuvered everyone. Kareem towered. Wilt did all the things. Tim Duncan spread through the game like tree roots.
Jokic carves the game to whatever he wants. You double him? He won’t just pass to the open man. He’ll pass to the cutter who your rotating defender leaves. You make him a scorer? He’ll punish you with jumpshots from short, middle, and long range. You put him on the line and he’ll sink the free throws.
He’ll throw touchdown passes and weakside no-looks and bounce passes to cutters and lobs to the dunker spot. He’ll score dunks (more than you’d think), floaters, hook shots, fadeaways, and jumpers.
No one shapes the game the way that he does, forcing the defense to adapt. Teams were helpless vs. Shaq in part because of the rules at the time. Shaq was a great passer, but he was not Jokic. No one is.
He’s a center with guard skills who can also maul you with his size and is built like a mastadon. He’s a supercomputer inside of a mack truck. He’s an artist who paints with muscle.
That’s what makes him the greatest big man of all time.
The verdict
If Joker does in fact win his fourth MVP this season, he’ll join Wilt Chamberlain among big men with four, but still trail Kareem by two more. If he wins a title he’ll have two, matching Wilt, but still trail Shaq’s three and Kareem’s five.
The defense is also just not something we can look past. Joker is neither as bad as his detractors claim nor as good as the advanced analytics suggest. He’s a minus defender, the only one of the legendary greats above besides maybe Wilt to be considered so.
Kareem didn’t always want to guard the toughest assignment, didn’t always dominate defensively. But he was still a presence.
Longevity matters, too. Shaq’s prime was only about four years but he was still massively impactful in 2005 and won a title as the second-best player on Miami in 2006. Hakeem was an MVP-caliber player for a decade.
And Kareem’s prime was almost 15 years.
So no, Nikola Jokic is not the greatest big man of all time,. Not yet, anyway, and he may never be.
But I will absolutely say he is the greatest offensive big man of all time.
For all Kareem’s scoring, for all of Shaq’s dunking, for all of Hakeem’s Dream Shakes, no one mastered every level and dynamic of the game offensively like Jokic.
And that ain’t bad.