The Denver Nuggets have been able to do just enough to continue their winning ways over the past couple weeks, but that luck ran out on Sunday night.
Against the visiting Washington Wizards, Denver was in the exact same situation of doing just enough to stay competitive — at least until Nikola Jokic lost his cool with 3:47 left in the fourth quarter and began to verbally attack official James Capers for missing a fairly obvious foul call which led to Jokic getting ejected from the game.
Here is the full play leading up to Jokic’s ejection, the ejection itself, as well as Jokic’s reaction to the ejection.
“I said, ‘James (Capers), he slapped me with two hands on my head’,” Jokic said as he explained his ejection from his point of view. “I don’t know; did I swear or something? But he gave me technical. I said something back and he said, ‘do you want another one?’ I said, ‘I don’t care’, and he gave me another one.”
For Nuggets’ head coach Michael Malone, Jokic getting ejected for the second time this season was the basketball equivalent of committing a cardinal sin. Getting ejected for the first time is forgivable, but to do it twice in one season with a top-two seed on the line is too far for Malone, who publicly called out his superstar in his postgame press conference.
“He cannot get tossed,” Malone explained with an extreme amount of frustration in his voice. “I do not care what they do to him or how bad the refereeing is. Foul call or no foul call, it does not matter. He is too valuable to our team. This is the second time it has happened. He cannot get tossed.”
As Malone alluded to, this was Jokic’s second time getting ejected and, even worse, this was his second time being ejected with less than four minutes remaining in the fourth quarter of a close game. As a cherry on top, both ejections came just 15 days apart. The last time Jokic was ejected was against the Indiana Pacers on March 16th and, unsurprisingly, he was ejected for the exact same reason; Jokic did not agree with a foul call and he blew up like a nuclear bomb on the closest official.
This is not to say that Jokic did not have a valid argument on both occasions. He was seemingly correct on both accounts, but that simply does not matter. Without Jokic, the Nuggets fall apart and become a mediocre team.
After the game, Jokic did make a point to speak on the fact that he felt he was fouled and that it is personally hard for him to endure getting fouled so often without getting a whistle.
“I was fouled 100 (percent),” Jokic said as he reflected back on his ejection. “I mean, they are going to see it on the two-minute review or whatever. They’re going to see that it was a foul or whatever.
“Sometimes it’s really hard, because, I mean, the ball is in my hands a lot so there is a lot of contact there. So, I know I’m not going to get every call, but, the obvious ones at least.”
Simply stated, Denver needs their Serbian superstar to stay on the floor. They cannot afford to lose him because Jokic is unable to keep his cool and is verbally berating officials. In the postseason, the physicality is going to ramp up and referees are going to swallow their whistle more and more. If Jokic wants to thrive in a playoff setting, he desperately needs to find a way to stay calm, cool, and collected or else he will end up hurting Denver’s odds to come away victorious in a playoff series.
After the game, Malone only spoke for a total of 89 seconds, but he said everything that needed to be said in just seven words.
“Hopefully (Jokic) will learn from his mistakes.”