Across the 2024-25 NBA regular season, the “clutchest” player in the league was Denver Nuggets superstar and three-time Most Valuable Player Award winner, Nikola Jokic. And not only was he the clutchest player in the league; he was the clutchest player in the league by quite some margin.
This ranking comes from the work of Inpredictable, a sports analytics website run by Michael Beuoy that focuses on win probability models, and anything derivative thereof. On the site’s “Clutch Player Tracker” section, Jokic’s clutch rating of 6.29 ranks ahead of the L.A. Lakers’ LeBron James’s 5.94 in second place, with Tyrese Haliburton of the Indiana Pacers being the only other player to score above 5.00.
What that number refers to is what Beuoy calls their “Clutch Win Probability”. Using a weighting mechanism described more thoroughly here, the clutch rating correlates the Win Probability Added by good plays (or subtracted for bad ones), weighted for the part of the game in which they do them. A 6.29 grade, then, equates to that playing having given his team a 6.29% extra chance of winning in clutch situations.
In essence, it is designed to incorporate not only the things that a player does, but when they do them. The higher the number, the better. And Jokic had the highest.
The Need For Aaron Gordon To Step Up
In the postseason, though, Jokic has not been at his best. Targeted by an elite Oklahoma City Thunder defence in their Western Conference semi-finals series, Jokic’s offensive performance has been struggling, resulting in a career-worst performance in Game Three of that series.
For the Nuggets to be leading two games to one in a series in which they have only led 11% of the available minutes, then, someone else needed to take the lead in close-game situations. And that someone has been 11-year veteran forward, Aaron Gordon.
Throughout the regular season, Gordon’s 1.97 clutch rating ranked him only fifth on his Nuggets team, behind Jokic (the aforementioned league-leading 6.29), Jamal Murray (4.01 and 13th overall in the league), Michael Porter Jr (3.20) and Christian Braun (2.55). In the postseason, though, he has not just led his team, but the entire NBA.
Only the aforementioned Haliburton, with his 1.62 clutch rating, comes close to Gordon’s 1.68. No one else even cracks the 1.00 mark; only Karl-Anthony Towns of the New York Knicks, with a 0.97 rating, is above 0.75. It is therefore empirically true to say that only Towns and Haliburton have been at least half as good in the clutch as Aaron Gordon has.
Jokic, by contrast, is not even in the top 100 for the league. And he is barely even in the top seven of his Nuggets team, even though they are only playing a seven-man playoff rotation.
Nuggets’ 2025 NBA Playoff Clutch rankings
Who Needs Numbers When We Have The Video?
Of course, it is not necessary to use advanced metrics and have a speaking spot at the Sloan Sports Conference to realise Gordon’s clutch-time heroics. The tale of the tape tells the story just as artfully, particularly in Game One, where Gordon’s unabashed confidence in shooting a three in the final seconds capped a ridiculous – in a good way – Nuggets late-game comeback.
Just as importantly, in the final seconds of regulation in Game Three, Gordon did it again. With 27 seconds left, he floated open into the corner, raised up and dropped in a game-tying three that levelled the scores at 102, and sent the game into overtime.
In the extra period, Gordon came through again on offence, with his baseline mid-range with 67 seconds remaining proving to be the “dagger” that closed out the victory. And in between, he was a key part of the much-improved defensive unit that held the Thunder to only two points in overtime, and that had held every Thunder play not named Jalen Williams to only 1-15 shooting in the fourth quarter.
With the shortened rotations, added physicality, extra minutes and heightened importance on every possession, the NBA Playoffs are a different challenge. One in which stars are born, and through which the strongest teams come through.
For everything he has done to build up the team to this point over the last decade, Nikola Jokic has needed some help these last two weeks. And Aaron Gordon has been exactly that.
The Clutchest Player in the NBA Playoffs? Aaron Gordon