How Nikola Jokic Injury Impacts OKC Thunder

When Nikola Jokic's leg buckled and his back slammed on the hardwood in South Beach, it looked bad. No one could stop their mind from fearing the worst as he held his knee in pain and hobbled to the locker room.

While there isn't a truly great outcome for situations like this, all things considering, the Nuggets can let out a sigh of relief with this morning prognoses of their superstar.

Jokic will be re-evaluated in four weeks with a left knee hyperextension. This is the first significant injury of his career that will hold him out for a large stretch of time, previous to this news the Nuggets star has played in at least 69 games in each season of his 10 year career.

You hate to see this happen to anyone but especially this All-time great who is putting together one of the most historic and eye-popping seasons the NBA world has ever seen. But while this does put a damper on things in Denver, the silverlining is that they avoided the worst and will get Jokic back before season's end.

The Denver Nuggets current sit at 22-10, with a 6-4 record in their last ten games, despite falling in their last two games. The problem for the current No. 3 seed in the rough and tumble Western Conference is the amount of injuries they are suffering all at once.

Not only is the heart and soul of their team, and arguably the best player in the league, out for at least a month, but starters Christian Braun, Cameron Johnson and Aaron Gordon are also sidelines and have been/will be for multiple weeks.

This run of injuries simply is too hard to overcome when the margin for error in the Western Conference is so slim. The difference in Denver and the play-in tournament is three games. Being less dramatic, their fall to the No. 4 and No. 5 seed matchup as they sat last year, would only take one game.

That is how you start to see this down turn in Denver impact the Oklahoma City Thunder. When healthy, or even remotely close to it, the Nuggets have proven to be a top three seed in this conference. They have pulled off some massive wins and been just more overall bought into the regular season than in year's past thanks to their improved depth. That would see the Thunder avoid their toughest competition in the NBA Playoffs until a possible Western Conference Finals matchup.

Now, it feels as though these two are on another second round collision course. That means that with two title contenders, one of them has to go home disappointed having not even made the conference finals. A byproduct of this injury.

Then you get to the more individualized impact on the Thunder, superstar Shai Gilgeous-Alexander has now taken a stranglehold of the MVP race but under terrible circumstances. Jokic will almost certainly miss out on the 65-game requirement to win individual honors and make All-NBA, which is beyond a bad rule by the league.

Voters were already taking into account availability when voting on these subjects in years past before the rule was implemented and had good discernment on when to hold missed games for rest or not grabbing a large enough sample size to make an impact against players and when to let a chunk of missed games slide for a true injury such as this one.

It is disheartening that such a fun back-and-forth statistical and true MVP race is now over due to an arbitrary cut off line from the league. Jokic's Christmas Day performance likely put him ahead in the race for now until this injury derailed things. Awards should not be decided by that.

The good news? This injury happened in December giving Denver plenty of time to get Jokic back into form for when the postseason rolls around and makes the NBA Playoffs even more fun as the Nuggets are a true blue title contender.