Lowe: 10 Christmas Day things, including an all-time great, a cagey Celtic and the Knicks!

Zach Lowe (@ZachLowe_NBA) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print.

It’s the Friday before Christmas, and that means … 10 things — Christmas Day edition! This week, we highlight two-time MVP Nikola Jokic making another MVP case, Jayson Tatum’s scary apex rise, and — holiday surprise! — the New York Knicks?

1. Nikola Jokic, always finding something new

The Denver Nuggets are No. 1 in the West. Jokic is averaging 24.7 points, 11 rebounds, 9.2 assists (what?), and 1.5 steals. He’s shooting 62% overall, and 67.5% on 2s. The Nuggets are obliterating teams when he’s on the floor and helpless when he rests. He’s No. 1 in almost every advanced statistic. It’s too early to suss out the MVP race, but it should go without saying that “I just didn’t feel like voting Jokic to the three-peat” is not sufficient support for voting someone else. Start preparing better rationales.

That better rationale might be that someone else on an elite team — Jayson Tatum, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Joel Embiid, and Kevin Durant being the front-runners among that group right now — is an amazing two-way player having an amazing season on par with what Jokic is doing. When it’s close, the “how much do I trust them in the second round of the playoffs?” test is not totally out of bounds as a tiebreaker — depending on individual voting preferences — even though the award is for the regular season.

But Jokic is absolutely this good. All-time-great good. And every season, he arrives with new skills-within-skills that make him even more unguardable.

Denver runs a lot of typical big man sets designed to get Jokic the ball on the move — usually for quick-hitting post-ups. But Jokic is hunting random cuts all over the floor, and weaseling his way to more easy buckets:

The Jokic-Jamal Murray give-and-go contains infinite possibilities. Jokic is scoring more off cuts this season and hitting more 2s without dribbling, per NBA.com. If the defense swarms on the catch, no one is better making snap reads in traffic.

2. Yes, Brook Lopez is that good on defense

If you want to boil Lopez’s improbable late-career Defensive Player of the Year case into one 10-second clip, this would do:

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