He doesn’t run very fast or jump very high, and seems to prefer the company of horses. But he has mastered the game’s new geometry like nobody else. ![Nikola Jokić holding a basketball during a game.]()
Among the many featsalready achieved by the Serbian big man Nikola Jokić—N.B.A. champion and two-time M.V.P.—his greatest accomplishment may be the way he has maintained a sense of mystery around himself. During this era of celebrity overexposure, Jokić harkens back to the days of folk heroes: he rarely speaks to the media outside of required press conferences; he underplays his accomplishments and says that professional basketball is a job like any other. (“Nobody likes his job,” he has said. “Or maybe they do. They’re lying.”) His relative silence has left others to do the talking—and,as Louisa Thomas writes in this week’s issue, people have plenty to say. “Slow and fat,” is how one fellow-player describes him, before noting that Jokić had taken him to school. Water comparisons come up a lot. “He blooms like a rose, or cascades like a waterfall!” the former player and trippy basketball philosopher Bill Walton exclaims. Huh? Thomas breaks it down: “Jokić’s movements are not silky, exactly—his shooting form is more sea lion than Steph Curry—and yet he plays the way water moves across rocks, finding the path of least resistance, even when that path is hard for others to see.” SupportThe New Yorker’saward-winning journalism.Subscribe today » | 
