Nikola Jokić’s 55-Point Masterpiece: Is This the Most Unbelievable Season in NBA History?

Nikola Jokić isn’t just playing basketball; he’s rewriting the very script of the NBA this season. Heading into Wednesday’s showdown, this Denver Nuggets maestro was running the league in assists and points generated by those dishes—no surprise here, but the devil’s in the details. This guy’s feeding more layups and dunks than any playmaker out there, putting defenses in a real bind. So, when Tyronn Lue, the Clippers’ head coach, rolled out a game plan to clamp down on Jokić’s passing and force him to carry the scoring load, you’d think he had it figured out. But oh boy, as it turns out, dealing with Jokić is like playing Whac-A-Mole—stop one thing, and another pops right up. The guy ended up dropping a monstrous 55 points, torching the Clippers despite their best efforts to shut him down. It’s not just a performance; it’s a statement—one that’s making coaches and fans alike scratch their heads in awe and frustration. The question now isn’t if Jokić can carry this pace, but how can anyone possibly stop a player who seems to elevate his game whenever the stakes rise? This is basketball artistry at its finest—and a nightmare for strategists. LEARN MORE

Nikola Jokić entered Wednesday’s action leading the NBA in assists and points created by assist, creating more buckets at the rim for his Denver Nuggets teammates than any other facilitator in the NBA. Knowing the danger that comes with trying to force the ball out of the big fella’s hands, only to see one of his running buddies calmly deposit it in the basket, LA Clippers head coach Tyronn Lue chose to adopt a strategy that a number of other opponents have tried in the past.

“Our game plan was to make him score — just take away his passing, take everybody else out of the game,” Lue said later.

As counterintuitive as it seems, there’s some logic to it: Over the course of Jokić’s career, the Nuggets had gone 186–63 (.747 winning percentage) when he’d dished 10 or more assists, compared to 22-15 (.594) when he scored 40 or more points. And, in one sense, Lue’s tactics worked. No other Nugget scored more than 18 points, with Jamal Murray, Aaron Gordon and Co. combining to shoot 26-for-61 (42.6%) from the field and 8-for-28 (28.6%) from 3-point land; Jokić finished with just six assists, a season-low.

Unfortunately for Lue, the trouble with Jokić is that even when you solve one problem, you’re left to deal with another.

“You know, I didn’t think he would score 55,” Lue added.

Weeeeeeell …

On the second night of a back-to-back on the road, after putting up 35-15-7 with as many missed shots as turnovers (three) in a dominant win over the Kings, Jokić actually missed three of his first four looks against the Clips — a lefty layup in traffic after diving to the rim out of the pick-and-roll, a 6-foot push shot after an offensive rebound, and a wide-open catch-and-shoot 3. He didn’t miss another shot for the rest of the quarter, uncorking a 25-point thunderbolt in the opening frame.

Jokić had 33 at halftime, cutting what had been a double-figure Clipper lead down to five heading into the locker room. He then went ahead and made his first seven shots out of intermission, a 19-point burst that firmly tilted the game in Denver’s favor.

After scoring 52 points on 22 shots in 31 minutes through three quarters, Jokić would return to the court midway through the fourth with the Nuggets up by 19 — a decision Denver head coach David Adelman defended as just trying to salt away the win against an opponent capable of getting hot from long distance. Six minutes later, that 130-116 win was secured; one more putback and free throw later, Jokić finished with 55 points — tying MVP combatant Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for the NBA’s single-game season high — on 18-for-23 shooting to go with 12 rebounds, 6 assists, 1 steal, 1 block and 2 turnovers in 34 minutes of work.

Jokić went 8-for-10 at the rim, 5-for-7 from midrange, 5-for-6 from 3-point range, and 14-for-16 from the free-throw line. He tortured Ivica Zubac and Brook Lopez running off pindown screens, popping to the 3-point arc after setting a ball screen, and facing up in the midrange. When he drew a smaller defender, he immediately took them into the weight room in the low post. When he drew a double-team, he calmly played out of it, creating incredible looks for his teammates.

“They went through a lot of defensive schemes,” Gordon told reporters. “None of them worked. I mean, he was cooking tonight.”

And cooking to a degree that even the NBA’s premier point producer had never previously reached. According to Game Score, a stat developed to offer a “rough measure of a player’s productivity for a single game” (think single-game player efficiency rating), what Jokić did to the Clippers on Wednesday was the best individual game of the season. More than that: It was his most productive performance — regular season or playoffs — ever.

“He was extraordinary,” Adelman told reporters. “That’s one of those performances you won’t forget.”

That feels kind of impossible: the notion that, at this stage, three MVP awards and seven consecutive All-NBA selections deep, we could be seeing the best version of Nikola Jokić there’s ever been.

And yet:

In NBA history, only one player has ever done each of these in the same season:

– 50+ point game

– 30/15/15 game

– 25+ point game without attempting a single free throw

That player is Nikola Jokic, who did each of those in the last eight days. pic.twitter.com/5qM2zRDfhz

— Jake Coyne (@TheStatSquatch) November 13, 2025

Jokić is now averaging 28.8 points per game, behind only Luka Dončić, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Gilgeous-Alexander, Tyrese Maxey and Donovan Mitchell among players who’ve played at least five games. He averaged more last season, but in nearly three more minutes per game; on a per-minute and per-possession basis, Jokić has never scored this much, thanks largely to a frankly unbelievable 78.3% field-goal percentage on 2-point shots.

The only players in Stathead’s database to make three-quarters of their attempts inside the arc in a season are Mitchell Robinson, DeAndre Jordan, Jaxson Hayes and Gary Payton II. They all took fewer than five 2-point shots per game. Jokić is taking nearly 12, taking them from a significantly farther average distance, and doing it against game plans geared specifically toward stopping him … and he’s still reducing it all to rubble. His touch — on half-hooks from the post, on putbacks around the rim, on floaters, on runners, on midrange turnarounds, on those defender-infuriating Sombor Shuffles — is unlike anything we’ve ever seen; it’s like each of his fingertips has its own brain, its own central nervous system, its own capacity to coax the rim into giving just enough to guide the ball to its intended destination.

Jokić combines that touch with the irrepressible bulk and strength that allows him to push any defender to the front of the rim, the quickness to run the floor on the fast break to create easy early offense, and a 3-point stroke that has seen him cash in on more than 40% of his triples in each of the last two seasons.

“When Joker does make 3s, he’s just impossible to guard,” Gordon recently said. “He already is impossible to guard.”

Add that all up, and you’ve got a recipe for unprecedented scoring efficiency. To wit:

Oh, also:

He leads the league in rebounding and assists per game, which nobody has ever done before for a full season (Wilt led the NBA in total assists in 1967-68, but Oscar Robertson averaged more per night);

Jokić’s touches, time of possession and usage rate are all down, year over year. So, too, are his post-ups, with Adelman saying that “if we can get through games without having to post him up 25 times, I think that’s beneficial for us and his body.”

More frequently sliding Jokić from the block up to the elbows or the top of the key is working out OK for the Nuggets’ overall offensive ecosystem, too, since stationing him up there lifts his defender out of the paint, creating all kinds of room for split actions, dribble handoffs and backdoor cuts. Denver ranks second in the NBA in possessions per game finished off cuts, according to Synergy, and is scoring 1.39 points per possession on them, tied for fifth-best in the league.

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With Jokić at the controls of this screen/cut/movement-heavy attack, and with Denver’s guards and wings eagerly feasting on the scoring chances they get just by playing opportunistically off the attention Jokić demands, the scoring efficiency is through the roof for a Nuggets offense that ranks No. 1 in the NBA, according to Cleaning the Glass. They’re scoring an obscene 131.3 points per 100 non-garbage-time possessions with the big fella on the floor — miles and miles above what the best offenses of all time have produced — and it feels like they haven’t even totally gotten going yet. Christian Braun and newcomer Cam Johnson are both shooting 21% from 3-point range; expect those numbers to go up if they keep getting a steady diet of these sorts of looks.

It seems reasonable to expect them, and the rest of the Nuggets, to keep getting these sort of looks, too, because Jokić is going to keep creating them. Bring multiple defenders to the ball and he’ll spoon-feed them high-percentage shots. Play him straight up and get roasted, to the point where you start bringing multiple defenders to the ball … and then he’ll start spoon-feeding them again. It’s a vicious cycle — one without any easy answers.

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“This is different,” Nuggets guard Bruce Brown told reporters after Wednesday’s masterclass. “They’ve gotta send a double or something. Just letting him play 1-on-1, I don’t think that’s the answer. … He’s the best player in the world, so I don’t know what you do with him.”

That’s just it, Bruce: When the best player in the world, who said he felt he was playing the best basketball of his life eight months ago, suddenly looks even better? There might not be anything to do with him.

“For me, in this modern generation of basketball, please show me who else is out there that plays like this at this efficient level offensively,” Adelman told reporters. “It’s a joy to watch.”

And a nightmare to game-plan against. Just ask Ty Lue.