1 key tweak to his game Nikola Jokic has already made to mask the Nuggets’ warts

There is no way to sugar coat it; the first three games of the season have been ugly for the Denver Nuggets. They finally got in the win column on Monday night, but it took a furious late comeback to force overtime before pulling out a 127-125 victory over the Toronto Raptors.

A win is a win, and at this point the Nuggets will win wherever they can get one, but that didn’t exactly ease the concerns surrounding the team. The Raptors aren’t a very good team, yet the Nuggets struggled mightily to get any separation.

For the third straight game, the bench was a disaster, they didn’t shoot nearly enough threes, Jamal Murray looked like he’d lost a step (despite his clutch heroics, he made an impressive reverse layup to force OT), and Russell Westbrook was actively hurting the team during his minutes.

With all the problems plaguing the Nuggets to start this season, leave it to the best player alive to have a solution to everything. Make no mistake, Nikola Jokic is the reason the Nuggets won this game. He is the reason they have been competitive at all through their first three games. And he’s the reason that as bad as the team has looked, they still have a chance this year.

Jokic had an impressive triple-double in the season opener against the Thunder, but the Nuggets scored 87 points and were blown out. Realizing what was needed, he immediately adapted and became much more aggressive.

Jokic has never been a player who looks to score first, but that’s exactly what he’s done the last two games — out of necessity. The Nuggets are suffering from shooting and offense, so Jokic has taken the burden on himself and is single-handedly saving the team on that end of the floor.

Two games ago, in the close loss to the Clippers, we saw an unusually aggressive Jokic as he scored 41 points on 26 shots and hit a career-high 7 threes on 12 attempts. It accounted for half of the Nuggets’ three-pointers and over a third of their total points. It wasn’t quite enough to win, but it kept the game within reach.

But that unusual performance was followed up with an equally aggressive showing as Jokic was determined to keep the Nuggets from falling to 0-3. He scored 40 points once again, this time on 27 shots, making 3/5 three-pointers.

It might not be how Jokic wants to play, but right now it’s how the Nuggets need him to play. They don’t have time to mess around and figure things out, they have to win games. Jokic knows that, and he’ll do whatever it takes to make it happen; even if that means leading the league in scoring this season.