Zena Keita

But now the main reason that we've been able to see Jamal Murray be excellent is because of the gravity that Nikola Jokic provides him to be able to maneuver around the court with a little bit more freedom.

We know that he can create, but now that he's going to be the number one option on the scouting report, what does that look like?

What does that look like once they clamp down?

And so I'm actually genuinely curious.

It's a really good question.

I'm not sure how they're going to figure it out, but they've been pretty resilient this year so far.

And what's so bad about this is that it's now training the voters to instead of look at the ridiculousness, the supreme level of basketball that Jokic has been playing as just the evidence for an MVP caliber season, it's training the voters to think of availability as just as important as 56 on Christmas Day.

You know what I mean?

And that kind of warps

the award races it and the worst part is is that you're talking about yeah let's say he plays 60 games we have to remember load management he'll be coming off of a injury so an injury so you've got to think about it it's not just 65 games it's the fact that you have to play 20 minutes in those 65 games and we don't know what it's going to take to ramp him back up i imagine that will be the minimum threshold but you never know and so even if he rocks out the rest of the season and and

In getting to 65, and I actually had to look this up, Sam Amick wrote an article about this back in 2024, I believe it was, explaining this new rule that was put into the CBA.

And all these players were like, I didn't agree to this.

I didn't agree to this.

And the main person that was really against it was Joel Embiid.

And we remember Joel Embiid before what we've seen, of course, with all of his injuries.

But he was also someone that was impacted by this negatively.

I think it's going to blow it up because it's genuinely making you have to look at these things.

Unbelievable performances from a perspective of calendar math.

Yeah, it's important to get that stat line out.

34 points, 8 assists, 10 rebounds.