Nikola Jokic Is a Different Player at Home

Nikola Jokic's night was over before the fourth quarter started, and not because anything had gone wrong. Thirty minutes, 32 points, 10 rebounds, 11 assists and three steals — the whole line banked through three quarters of a 128–109 win over the Toronto Raptors at Ball Arena on Wednesday — and then a seat on the bench to watch the finish. For almost anybody else that is a career night. For Jokic it is the latest entry in the strangest split of the young season: the best player in the world is scoring like two different people depending on the building he is standing in.

Seven regular-season games in — the preseason is not counted here, and it should not be — Jokic is averaging 28.0 points per game at home and 17.3 on the road. The home lines are 35 against New Orleans, 19 against Golden State, 26 against Portland and Wednesday's 32 against Toronto. The road lines are 13 at Oklahoma City, 21 at New Orleans and 18 at Phoenix. That is a gap of nearly 11 points a night, and Wednesday widened it from the home side.

Seven games is a blink

The honest part comes next, because it has to: seven games is a blink. One loud week at altitude can bend a split like this out of shape, and nobody should be engraving anything in the first week of November. But the shape of it is real enough to watch: his two lowest scoring nights of the season — 13 at Oklahoma City and 18 at Phoenix — both came on the road. The home games have been heavy; the road games, by his standards, have been quiet — and the pattern held on a night when Toronto spent a half making Denver work for everything it got.

The Raptors actually led this game at the break, 67–64, behind nine first-half 3-pointers, and Jokic had spent the half doing a little of everything except separating the score. The third quarter separated it. He opened the half with a steal and a breakaway dunk, Denver took the lead for good in the opening minutes of the quarter, and the period closed 41–15 — Toronto scored 42 points in the entire second half after putting up 67 in the first. Denver shot 62 percent from the field as a team, all five starters scored in double figures, and the bench added 42 points, 18 of them from rookie Bryce Hopkins. RJ Barrett led Toronto with 22 and Scottie Barnes had 17, but by the fourth quarter the only question left was the margin, and Jokic watched it settled.

Toronto got 13 points and seven assists from Immanuel Quickley and 13 more from rookie Collin Murray-Boyles off the bench, and still watched a three-point halftime lead become a 23-point hole by the end of the third.

It helped that Denver fed him the way its coach asked it to. David Adelman said before the game that the Nuggets were trying to get Jokic onto the block more instead of starting every possession up near the 3-point line, and Wednesday he lived in the paint — 13-for-19 from the field without making a single 3-pointer, the triple-double done before the third quarter ended. Denver is 4–3. Toronto falls to 4–4.

Now the road gets its say

The split gets its examination now. Wednesday was Denver's last home game for a while: the next four are all on the road — at Indiana on Saturday, then Houston, Memphis and New Orleans — before Phoenix comes to Ball Arena on November 16. If 17.3 is really who he is away from home this season, the trip will say so. If it was just a quiet first week of travel, that will show too. At home, for now, he is a 28-point scorer. The road gets the next four chances to argue.

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