Nikola Jokic keeps piling up individual honors, but one new NBA ranking puts a rough spotlight on the reality around him in Denver.
The Nuggets star, who already owns three MVP awards, an NBA Finals MVP, six All-NBA First Team selections, three runner-up MVP finishes and six straight top-two MVP finishes, also has eight All-Star appearances to his name. But there’s a catch that stands out more than the total itself: Jamal Murray is the only teammate to join him there, and that happened just once.
HoopsHype’s latest All-Star greatness list makes that lack of help impossible to ignore. Among players with eight All-Star nods, Jokic sits at the bottom in terms of surrounding talent, a jarring reminder of how thin the star support has been across his 11-year career.
Murray’s first All-Star season in 2025-26 at least gave Jokic a second name on the board. It took a career year to get there, and maybe a little help from injuries elsewhere in the West.
Murray put up career-best numbers across the board, finishing with 25.4 points, 7.1 assists and 4.4 rebounds per game. It was also his healthiest season in seven years.
For now, he remains Jokic’s best shot at adding another All-Star teammate in 2026-27. But based on how things have gone, that probably means hoping Stephen Curry, Shai-Gilgeous-Alexander or Luka Doncic are unavailable when the selections are made.
None of that lands as a knock on Murray. He’s done his part as a strong sidekick to Jokic. The issue is how the All-Star voting and selection process has played out.
And that’s why Jokic may stay at the top of this unfortunate list for a while. He lifts everyone around him with his passing and the way defenses have to load up on him, creating cleaner looks all over the floor.
But if the Nuggets make roster changes, they’re more likely to be tied to salary trimming or draft capital than to bringing in another major piece. That leaves Murray as the lone realistic path to another All-Star teammate next to Jokic.
It’s an awkward stat, but it also says plenty about Jokic himself: he’s built an all-time resume while carrying the kind of burden most superstars never have to shoulder.
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One of the ideas worth watching is how much the Nuggets lean into bigger combinations, since the team has been searching for ways to make life easier on that end of the floor. Bagley gives them another option to pair with Jokic, and the intrigue is less about whether the Nuggets can create a different look than whether that look can hold up when the games tighten and the margins get smaller. [Read more 🡒]