A milestone hidden in plain sight: What Jokic quietly achieved on Friday
With Nuggets star Nikola Jokic’s fourth assist on Friday night against the Memphis Grizzlies, he achieved a feat only accomplished by two other NBA players.
On Friday night, the Denver Nuggets beat the Memphis Grizzlies 117-109 as Nuggets star Nikola Jokic scored 26 points, 16 rebounds, and 12 assists. In doing so, Jokic achieved an NBA milestone that only two other players achieved before him.
Jokic joins an ultra-exclusive NBA club
Thanks to Jokic’s fourth assist of the night on Friday, he will average a triple-double for the season - just the third player in NBA history to achieve that feat and the first center to do so. His fourth assist was his 700th of the season, assuring him an average of at least 10 assists for 70 games. He also managed to get a triple-double in the game, his 34th of the season.
Jokic now averages 29.8 points, 12.8 rebounds, and 10.3 assists for the season. He’s currently got more triple-doubles this season than any other three players in the league combined. He has 164 regular-season triple-doubles in his career, the second-most in NBA history behind his teammate Russell Westbrook, who has 203 total. Jokic is the second player in NBA history to have at least 30 triple-doubles in a season. Westbrook is the only other player to pull that off, and he did it three times.
The Nuggets star is a top candidate - again - for the NBA MVP award this season, after having won three of the last four. He’s assured that he’ll finish this season with his career-best scoring and is on his way to his second-best rebound average. He needs 47 points on Saturday in the Nuggets’ season finale against the Houston Rockets to push his average scoring for the season to 30 points. If he does, it would be just the third 30-point triple-double average in NBA history.
The NBA players to achieve a triple-double average for a season
The only other players to average a triple-double for a season were Jokic’s teammate Russell Westbrook and Hall of Famer Oscar Robertson. Westbrook has accomplished the feat four times, in 2016-17, 2017-18, and 2018-19 for the Oklahoma City Thunder, and in 2020-21 for the Washington Wizards and Robertson did it just once, in the 1961-62 season for Cincinnati.
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