Thanks Spurs!
Jokic a monster offensively, but you can literally take advantage of him every time down the court defensively. Cost several big buckets down the stretch because he couldn’t stay in front of his man.
Another day, another Jpotter post trashing Jokic's defence incorrectly 
Incorrectly? The guy is a wet paper bag defensively. He makes Kornet look serviceable.
Yes, incorrectly. As in provably false. You're equating of his slow perimeter defence with being a negative on that end is, simply, wrong.
It's *hardly* just his slow perimeter defense. The vast majority of the time I watch him he hardly gives any effort even in the post, outside of grabbing rebounds. Like, this is literally just from one game, and it's not an aberration:
https://twitter.com/aidanlaporta69/status/1633978624805158914?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
You can post as many flawed advanced defensive metrics that you want that are misleading and biased due to defensive rebounding weightiness, subpar backups, other team contextual factors, etc., but nobody can sit there with a straight face and argue that Jokic is even an average level defender when you actually lay eyes on him. This is especially true given that his position is traditionally - and probably still is - the most important defensive position in basketball.
LOL!
Here's a very simple metric - Jokic is in the 96th percentile for defensive points/possession, and he was in the 95th for that last season. For the majority of his career, he has been in the top 16 percent for that metric.
How does his team's defence perform so much better with him on the floor, if he's not even an average level defender? Please, explain that to me.
The fact that you're touting an on/off statistic as "simple" is part of the problem. Sure, it's not super complicated to actually compute, but as with all on/off stats, it's very context-laden and can be very biased and misleading due to the contextual factors.
In the case of Jokic, lineups and Malone's rotation patterns seem to explain a lot of this contradiction with the eye test. Jokic plays a heavy, heavy proportion of his minutes with the primary starting group or four starters with one bench player. Even with a cumulative 54 games missed by the starters, Jokic has played nearly 27% (!) of his total minutes with the starting group, and when you also consider lineups with four starters plus one bench player, that jumps up to nearly 59% (!) of his total minutes.
Compare that to someone like JT. Even combining our two main starting lineups in JT, JB, Smart, Al, and White/Rob (which itself isn't completely fair, as the White lineup is a regular first sub lineup in games when fully healthy), JT has only played approximately 17% of his total minutes with those two main starting lineups. And while the injuries to the starters have made it virtually impossible to also accurately calculate combination starting/bench lineups given the nightly variance, looking at the lineup data highlights that JT's lineup distribution minutes are much more equitably distributed between primary starting and primary/mixed bench units (see
https://www.basketball-reference.com/players/t/tatumja01/lineups/2023).
So the fact that Denver plays Jokic with the starting five and primary starter units so frequently *absolutely* impacts the on/off stats in a misleading way, as of course there's going to be that kind of major distinction between Jokic on/off the court given the quality of the lineups, even defensively. These and other advance stats' issues are also compounded by the fact that Denver's backup big/center position has been a joke all season (hello DJ and Cancar); I mean, the fact that Thomas Bryant was seen as such a great move for them to shore up their backup big depth is telling.
A truer "simpler" stat (though still with contextual factors - like % of switches leading to mismatches which isn't as much of a concern with Jokic given that Denver rightly tries to avoid this with their scheming) would be to look at Jokic's defensive field goal percentage, which are pretty scary for a center and appear to be right at the worst in the league for starting centers close to Vucevic and Valuncinas. Overall, opponents shoot .4% better against Jokic than their average: 1.7% better on 3pfg%; 1.6% better on >15 feet shots; -1.1% better on <10 feet; .5% better on <6 feet. (Note that Jokic's primary backup Bryant is now at +4.2% DFG%, too, furthering the argument above.)
For comparison, Timelord forces opponents to shoot -6.3% lower than average: -2.9% on 3pfg%; -2.2% on >15 feet shots; -7.3% on <10 feet; -9.9% on <6 feet.
And this is much more consistent with what we see from Jokic when actually watching him with your eyes. Jokic is simply not a good defender or rim protector at all, which I think is mostly explained by lack of mobility and some lack of effort due to high workload offensively. But it's also about his overall game. He prioritizes rebounding positioning over actual shot defense and alterations, which gives him great rebounding percentages (that also highly skews the other advanced defensive metrics in his favor) but comes at the cost of not impacting and altering shots in a way that most centers do, which is depicted in numerous plays in the video shared above.
So, again, no - Jokic is in no way an average defender, let alone some good to great defender like you're arguing. Relying solely on the advanced defensive metrics that do not matchup with the eye test is simply fallacious, as there are so many caveats and contextualities with the advanced metrics that they're useless without also observational correlation.
