Nikola Jokic waltzed through the drab visitor’s locker room in Houston in early April when he overheard something that piqued his interest.

“He’s the most even-keeled superstar I’ve ever been around,” DeAndre Jordan mused to a reporter, prompting Jokic to lean in and inquire.

Jordan, a heady 15-year veteran, wasn’t about to miss the layup.

“No, not you,” Jordan said, swatting Jokic away like a gnat. “I’m talking about Bruce (Brown).”

Content with Jordan’s wit, Jokic barely reacted before ambling on toward his locker room stall.

On the eve of the most important postseason of his career to date, Jokic is more at ease than one might think after wading through the mud of a toxic MVP race, carrying a franchise for consecutive seasons, and fighting to protect his humility in the face of increasing celebrity.

Even as the noise got louder, and the possibility Jokic could join a club currently occupied by only Wilt Chamberlain, Bill Russell and Larry Bird grew more pronounced, he did everything he could to avoid inflaming the discourse. Whether he wins MVP for a third straight year or not, this playoff push could serve as a referendum on Jokic that the last two postseasons, due to notable absences among his teammates, could not. Denver is healthy and in possession of the top seed in the Western Conference, paving the way for what would be the franchise’s first trip to the NBA Finals. Anything less than reaching the conference finals would be cast by some pundits as a disappointment.

But the Nuggets’ generational star doesn’t appear to be bogged down by the criticism or the expectations.

“Have you seen his brothers?” Jordan asked. “They used to kick his (butt). I think he’s fine. Anything that you throw at him, you know what I’m saying? … Nothing really rattles him and that’s very rare, especially in our game and how emotional and up and down it is. But you need a guy like that who can kind of settle the waters and kind of make everybody feel calm in the sense of he’s not panicking, almost like a Tim Duncan effect. And that’s huge, especially when it’s your best player.”

“Just playing the game”

Jokic can’t remember if he had Instagram or social media when his star first started to rise. Before he won consecutive MVPs and unwittingly became the center of a historic debate, Jokic finished fourth during the 2018-19 season, behind Giannis Antetokounmpo, Paul George and James Harden.

Still, Jokic, an anomalous, Serbian outsider, had crashed the party. At that point, Jokic conceded it was fun to monitor the discourse.

“Maybe it was just new,” Jokic told The Denver Post. “So that’s (why) maybe I was following, but now I don’t follow anything.”

It’s a calculated decision, those close to him say, about what he allows to enter his frame of mind and what never even reaches his radar. Still, the algorithm can occasionally circumvent his lumbering defense.

As he was scrolling YouTube one day, one of Kendrick Perkins’ unsubstantiated rants popped onto his feed.

“That’s why I said it,” Jokic said, referencing his unsolicited retort to Perkins on March 8. “But I don’t really listen to those people.”

There’s an art to exercising that type of discretion. It involves watching copious amounts of horse racing, prioritizing his wife and daughter, and sheltering himself from the rest of the outside world. When winning the MVP for a third consecutive time became a possibility, and the ensuing conversation turned ugly, Jokic couldn’t comprehend what he’d done to engender such animosity. Especially because winning two MVPs was a byproduct of his success and never his goal.

Even amid a sour end to the regular season, Jokic maintained what appeared to be a healthy outlook. Asked whether it was important to leave basketball and the accompanying pressures at the gym, he entertained the question with rare candor.

“I mean, it is and it’s not because I think if you want to be successful, you need to be obsessed with it,” Jokic said. “So not just in basketball. I think in everything that you do you need to be obsessed and think about it 24/7, but it helps sometimes when you don’t think about it. It’s a line between to be obsessed and still have time to relax.”

But doesn’t that burden, considering all Jokic has shouldered for consecutive seasons, become onerous?

“Yeah, I mean it depends,” Jokic said. “If you love the game and you want to be obsessed, and you want to be the best ever, probably, it’s not (hard), probably, it’s fun. Depends, I mean, depends with the player. Depends on the personality, character.”

Jokic’s workload and dedication suggest a level of unassailable commitment. Yet he’s careful to categorize it as an obsession.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m just playing the game. Sometimes maybe, sometimes I’m not, so I don’t have a hundred percent answer, (if) I’m obsessed or not.”

And what about pressure, that other amorphous quality that follows Jokic around like a shadow?

Jokic said he doesn’t have a “routine” or a “solution” when confronted with pressure in a basketball setting. He said he does his best not to think about the stakes.

“I don’t know,” he said glibly. “I don’t have an answer. Just maybe who I am. Maybe that’s my personality.”

“He knows who he is”

Vlatko Cancar is one of Jokic’s closest confidantes in the organization. On road trips, it’s almost exclusively Cancar who gets one of the stalls next to the MVP.

A 26-year-old Slovenian, Cancar conscientiously keeps conversations light and tries to inject his wry humor whenever possible.

“I check on him,” Cancar said. “And I checked on Luka (Doncic) when he was saying all of that stuff that he is not happy.”

Cancar, whose profile is dwarfed by Jokic’s, still finds the talking heads unavoidable.

“As much as you want to say, I don’t watch media, blah blah, blah, you hear it, you’re the best (freaking) player in the world,” he said. “Of course you’re going to hear everything. Everybody’s criticizing you. … It’s just so hard not to see it. Turn on TV and I don’t know, CBS or whoever puts on those two guys, (Shannon) Sharpe and (Skip) Bayless keep talking (garbage).”

But Jokic is determined not to give any credence to media noisemakers. It’s their job to talk, the MVP said. His job is to play.

Nuggets coach Michael Malone said Jokic’s decision to avoid what’s being said about him publicly is an indication of how grounded he is as a person. And whether he’s being touted as an MVP candidate, or celebrated as a dominant postseason player (26.4 points per game average), who Jokic is doesn’t waffle.

“In today’s NBA, you have certain players, certain stars who are reading anything and everything written about them, and I think what makes Nikola unique is that what allows him to thrive in the face of adversity or negativity or pressure is that he doesn’t read it,” Malone said.

“… He is kind of just oblivious to it, man. I think that’s really the biggest key for him is that he’s not one of those guys that is looking for the people on social media to love him. He doesn’t care. He’s got it. He knows who he is as a person, first and foremost, as a son, as a brother, as a husband, as a father, and he doesn’t need everybody else’s validation. He’s very content and comfortable in his own skin.”

“The same way … every time”

Though numerous players and coaches maintained he’s been in a good head space this season, it was still unsettling to see the Nuggets drop five of their final seven games while Jokic navigated a nagging calf injury. Since the All-Star break, the Nuggets (12-11) were barely a .500 team with a pedestrian offense and middling defense.

The mediocrity, paired with the audible MVP chatter, was enough to consider whether the noise had gotten to Jokic. For better or for worse, the scrutiny will only increase this postseason after his two MVP seasons yielded only one playoff series win. But a healthy Jamal Murray and Michael Porter Jr. change the parameters of the discussion. Whatever Denver does in the playoffs, there can be no accompanying asterisk over who was on the floor with him. Though he may not win the MVP for a third time, Jokic finally has what matters significantly more to him: help.

Their returns, coupled with the defensive potential of Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Aaron Gordon, Bruce Brown and Christian Braun, have significantly lightened Jokic’s burden. It’s why, according to another person close to Jokic, this year might not have been as hard as the prior two.

“He’s the same way with us every time,” veteran Jeff Green said. “… I mean, he’s a happy guy. He loves life. He goes about it his way and that’s what I respect him for.”

If the vitriol of this season ever affected him, “he hasn’t shown it,” Green said.

Jordan has a different theory on how Jokic handles the harsh glare of the spotlight.

“I feel like he does it with such ease because I think with all the accolades individually, I think he still cares about his teammates being better around him,” Jordan said. “So when you got the right (stuff) on your mind, other stuff doesn’t matter.”

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