Guest Adam Mares doesn’t quite see Nikola Jokic, 23, as the frontrunner, but he believes he’s more broadly changing how we define an NBA MVP (Keith Allison/Creative Commons).

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The Denver Nuggets are on the upswing with a talented young core and six straight months of winning basketball. They also hold the Western Conference’s No. 1 spot, one and a half games ahead of the Thunder and Warriors, and are led by MVP candidate Nikola Jokic. Adam Mares of SB Nation’s Denver Stiffs and Locked On Nuggets breaks down what makes Denver tick.   

Here are some particularly golden nuggets (*Due to dynamic advertising, time stamps may vary per listener):

7:13-7:30: “You look at the 2015 Warriors. If I said, ‘Oh, take Steph Curry off that team,’ the offense all of a sudden doesn’t look good, and everybody would understand that. They’d say, ‘OK, well, yeah, of course you miss Steph Curry.’ We don’t think about this defensively. Paul Millsap is Denver’s Steph Curry on the defensive end. He has that type of impact.”  

11:12-13:14: “Isaiah Thomas [is] allegedly looming somewhere on the horizon, and he’s the one guy who has never played on this roster and whose role on this roster, I think, is not very clear. So he’s one guy that, I don’t know if it’s just a matter of a week or two of it being rocky. It just might not be a good fit. Who knows?

…There is, in theory, a role that he could play and play at a high level. The problem is the guy he’s replacing, Monte Morris, in his second season, has just been so good that it’s hard to imagine – and that second unit as a whole – that it’s hard to imagine it being better.”      

16:10-16:20: “I tell people this all the time, and I don’t care how crazy it sounds: They are probably the second, third or fourth most talented team in the NBA just when you talk about their top 10 guys.” 

18:13-18:27: “To me, I look at this time and I think, ‘If anything, all the indicators are that they have a much higher gear in them. Not only do they get guys back and healthy, but some of their best 3-point shooters have been in a season-long slump and they’ve still managed to win.’”    

25:33-25:56: “For whatever reason, we think that an MVP has to look like James Harden, where the ball’s in their hand for the entire possession and they hit a step-back 3 at the buzzer, and that’s an MVP. What Jokic does, and, again, I don’t think he’s the MVP, but I think that he provides us an opportunity to talk about what’s actually valuable in basketball and what’s actually valuable in basketball in 2019.”  

34:59-35:16: “Playing with Jokic just generates the best types of shots within the flow of the offense, especially from the 3-point line. They’re set shots, spot-up shots in rhythm, in the flow of the game. And I just don’t think it’s a coincidence that so many players have come here and had great years.”  

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Music: “Who Likes to Party” by Kevin MacLeod.