Nikola Jokic And Anthony Edwards Gave Us A Christmas Game For All Time

Game Of The Year is a designation that inevitably gets handed out several times a year, and not always with good reason. Recency bias can be a malign influence, it can be hard to stay objective in the moment, and the season moves so fast that it's difficult to remember what happened even a few weeks ago. But at 1:48 a.m. ET, as I finally laid my head on the pillow after watching the Denver Nuggets defeat the Minnesota Timberwolves 142-138 in overtime, only one thought was in my head: That was the Game Of The Year. The thought was still there when I woke up a few hours later, and you know what? I'm leaving it there. Game Of The Year!

The box score leaves little room for argument in the other direction. It's hard to craft a better basketball game than one that features one star (Nikola Jokic) putting up a 56-15-16, another (Anthony Edwards) punching back with 44 points, and both teams combining to score 50 points in a five-minute overtime period. More importantly, this game had what every potential Game Of The Year needs, which is minutes-long stretches of pure mania.