Nikola Jokćc landed at No. 1 on our preseason NBA99, ranking the 99 best players in the NBA as the 2026-27 season begins. Check out the rest of the list here.

Arguing that Nikola Jokić is the best player in the NBA is like arguing that water is wet. There are people on the internet that will try to debate you on it, but we all know the answer: Jokić is the king, and everyone else is trying to claim their 15 minutes of fame. And it’s really not hard to make the case.

Nikola Jokić has the most impressive resume of the 2020s

In the last six seasons, Jokić has finished no lower than second in MVP voting and won three of them. He has averaged a triple-double in back-to-back seasons. He is the single most destructive offensive player of the spacing era and the greatest single data point for those that wish to argue that basketball may soon become a solved game, as his understanding of half-court geometry in the age of 3-point shooting is unlike anyone or anything ever seen before. 

Jokić was top-10 in scoring in 2025-26 while leading the entire NBA in rebounding and assists. He also led the NBA in Box Plus/Minus by a mile (a solid but not perfect catchall advanced stat we used to evaluate player impact, somewhat like WAR in baseball but not nearly as good) and was fifth in true shooting percentage, a soup of definitions that basically means that Jokić had one of the most efficient and impactful offensive seasons in NBA history. And he did not win MVP.

Why? Well, his team didn’t win that many games, and the actual MVP, Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, led his team to 10 more wins than Jokić’s despite the fact that he is playing on a superteam Death Star with all the support in the world while Jokić was scraping together a bunch of Christian Braun and Tim Hardaway Jr. minutes and still ran a top-five offense. The other argument I heard, and continue to hear, for Shai is that is that was having a completely unheard-of scoring season for a guard, and his 66.5 true shooting percentage is utterly outlandish for a perimeter player. But I also … don’t care? You could be a guard, center, point-center, player-coach or a part-time equipment manager/backup two-guard — Jokić was the better player and ran the offense like any guard would, I don’t care what position they officially play!

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Jokić breaks the game, and is a better defender than most realize

What about defense? Defense … defense, defense, defense. Never has a word been so variously weaponized in service of arguments about which it has nothing to do. Defense is the NBA is not half of player evaluation. It is, in my vibed estimation, about one-fifth of player evaluation. If you think that’s crazy, watch an NBA game in the next week and try to find a possession that is a true isolation — you will struggle to do so, because most possessions will contain help defense, rotations and significant scheme alterations that constitute team defense. But if you do find an isolation possession, probably from an elite iso scorer like Kevin Durant or Jayson Tatum, let me know what happens to the defender. 

Did they get absolutely annihilated? Yeah, because that’s what happens in the modern NBA. Elite players are so skilled that stopping them is no longer possible for one person. If it does happen, it’s usually a miracle or the defender is Victor Wembanyama, the lone outlier whose defense is so destructive that it must be singularly gameplanned around. 

Nikola Jokić is, by every metric we’ve created, an excellent defender — he was second only to Wembanyama in defensive box plus/minus last season. Beyond that, he’s also a good team defender because he’s a basketball genius; that’s what matters in 2026, not some nebulous concept of isolation defensive ability. Nobody, other than Wemby, can stop iso scoring consistently. 

Jokić's offensive ability overwhelms all other contenders for the belt

Jokić is the greatest offensive engine of my lifetime in an era where offense is far more important than defense. There is a chicken-or-the-egg argument with defense-vs-offense in sports analytics, because we struggle to analyze what teams do when they don’t have the ball because they aren’t usually recording any stats. That often leads us to believe that offense is more important than defense because we can see it, but it’s also changed the game as nerds like me have become more powerful in NBA front offices and coaching staffs; whether it was inherently true or not, the analytical superiority of offense has been promoted by those who prefer it. That is Jokić’s playground. 

I will continue to believe, then, that Nikola Jokić is the best player in the NBA until someone else proves that they can be one-man top-five offense and bring something else to the table that Jokic does not. The only person I see with that potential is Wembanyama, but he has a ways to go offensively even if his rim protection is the defensive equivalent of Jokić’s offensive genius. For now, I’m sticking with Jokić.