Listen, I will happily devour any article about Nikola Jokic. He’s my big special guy and every anecdote that gets published about him keeps a place in the most lovingly curated segment of my mind. So it is with great sadness that I am forced to issue a yellow card on this simile from The Athletic’s recent story on Jokic, written by Fred Katz:
Early in Brown’s season in Denver, the guard went into a handoff play with Jokić. Once the MVP received the basketball, both his defender and Brown’s followed him, which left Brown open. Brown screamed out the proper terminology.
“Wolf! Wolf!” he yelled, the Nuggets’ alert that a double team was coming.
With no one on him, Brown then cut to the basket, figuring Jokić could hit him for an easy layup. Instead, Jokić tossed a no-look pass far behind him and out of bounds. Later in the game, Jokić explained why.
“Don’t cut,” he told Brown. “I’m listening to your voice.”
Jokić, like a bat, can tell where people are just by where sound waves originate. From that point on, Brown never cut after yelling for the ball; Jokić hit him with no-look dimes constantly.
Bats use echolocation to navigate and find prey in the dark. The ability to “tell where people are just by where sound waves originate” can be more easily described as “hearing,” which is an ability that many of Earth’s creatures possess. When your child calls to you from a separate room in the house, and you walk over to where she is to ask what she needs, you are not being like a bat. You are just hearing stuff.
Thank you for your time. This blog is over.
