Six games. That's the entire case for "the end of Nikola Jokic's prime," and it got Bill Simmons choked up on his podcast this week. On the November 3 episode he said he wanted to "pour one out for apex Joker," the version of Jokic he thinks belongs in the conversation as maybe the best offensive player ever. He admitted he isn't fully writing Jokic off. Then he said he's "really concerned about him post-injury last year," pointing to how Jokic looked coming back, how he looked in the playoffs, and how he looks now, "because he can't shoot threes anymore. They're not going in."
The threes not going in is a Jokic problem. Everything else wrong in Denver is a front-office problem, and it's the bigger one.
The shooting dip is real, and it's lasted longer than six games. Across the six seasons before he hyperextended and bruised his left knee last December, Jokic put up something like 26.9 points, 12.4 rebounds and 9.3 assists on 58/38/82 splits. He sat out 16 games after that injury. Through the first six games of this season he's at 22.0 points, 9.7 rebounds and 9.0 assists while hitting just 22.6 percent from three. That's a cold stretch from deep.
But "not currently draining threes at his peak rate" and "his prime is over" are two different sentences, and Simmons is treating them like one. A 22-9-9 line on a thin team that keeps losing close games shows a guy still carrying the roster. The Nuggets are 3-3 and fourth in the Northwest through those six games, a number that's going to move. A center still stuffing the box score every night is still playing like one of the best players alive.
So who actually hollowed out this roster? The same front office that traded Michael Porter Jr. to Brooklyn for Cam Johnson in June 2025, and attached an unprotected 2032 first-round pick to do it. The same front office that let its draft capital dry up to the point of owning zero tradeable first-rounders, which means almost no way to fix anything in-season. Then, with the holes wide open, they went bargain shopping: DeMar DeRozan on a minimum deal, Marvin Bagley on a minimum deal. That's the plan to keep a three-time MVP in the title race. Minimums and a bare cupboard.
Meanwhile the teams built to beat him got better. Last spring the Timberwolves knocked Denver out of the first round 4-2, closing it 110-98 in Game 6, and they did it with Rudy Gobert smothering Jokic in stretches, 7-for-26 in Game 3, 1-of-8 in a Game 2 run, plus a bench that ran Denver off the floor. Minnesota won on depth. Denver's answer to a depth loss was to get shallower.
The one honest counter is that six games is nothing and the real test comes in the spring. That argument actually undercuts Simmons more than it helps him. If six games are too thin to crown a team, they're too thin to hold a funeral for a player's prime. You don't get to wave off the sample when it's good news and lean on it when it fuels a cry on a podcast.
And the comparisons Simmons himself reached for undercut the whole bit. Steph Curry won a title in 2022. LeBron won one in 2020. Sliding off a statistical peak doesn't mean you stop winning. Simmons is mixing the two together. Jokic can slide off his historic peak and still be the best center alive and a problem in May.
Simmons spotted something real here: the shooting slump, the injury hangover, the playoff loss. He turned all of it into an obituary because "end of an era" sells better than "the front office didn't build a deep enough team." Check back in 30 games. The tears were pointed at the wrong bench.
