Friday nights in SKC 🏠
— New Orleans Pelicans (@PelicansNBA) January 28, 2022
🏀: vs Denver
🕖: 7pm CST
📺: @BallySportsNO
📻: @ESPNRadioNOLA#Pelicans | @SmoothieKing pic.twitter.com/6iTYEgfnCX
The Pels take on the Nuggets, tonight. The Nuggets are 26-21, and have won 4 of their last 5 including wins over Brooklyn and Clippers, but also two wins over the woeful Pistons. So it's a weird 4 games of winning, in terms of implications.
They're led by Nikola Jokic, who has missed some games this year, but who is following his MVP campaign with yet another campaign of pure excellence.
Jokic is averaging 26/14/7.5 on 65.2%TS, is leading the league in PER, WS, WS/48, BPM, and VORP (for the second consecutive year) and is also leading the NBA in EPM: The gap in EPM between Jokic (+9.4) and second place (Curry, +7.6) is 1.8. This is larger than the gap between Curry and 5th place (Giannis). He is having yet another incredible year. And he's doing it with improved defense as well; he's actually in the 99th percentile for defense so far this year, and his on/off is +22. Which is just absurd.
Of course, part of the reason his on/off is so gaudy is that the Nuggets are pretty awful without him. Missing both Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr for the entire year, and having dealt with a number of injuries to the already fairly shallow rotation through the season, Jokic has been left carrying a fairly middling team, which explains why the Nuggets are only slightly above .500 and why he's not going to repeat as MVP despite playing on that level.
Will the Nuggets recent winning streak continue in New Orleans, or can the Pels overcome an entire hospital ward's worth of injuries to pull one out? Who knows, let's find out.