The two-time MVP Nikola Jokic showed glimpses of his mystifying ability at an early age -- and inside a tiny gym in his hometown of Somber, Serbia, where he would develop into the most unguardable big man in basketball.
) is a senior writer for ESPN Digital and Print, focusing on the NBA. He has covered the Lakers, the Celtics and previously worked for The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times.Game 4 of the 2023 Western Conference finals tipped off at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles, Ognjen Stojaković kept his eyes trained ondirector of development and an assistant coach, stood beyond the 3-point arc, donning black shorts and a long-sleeved gray Nuggets T-shirt on this Monday evening in late May.
"He sees plays before they happen," James said of Jokic."Maybe it's not talked about, because a lot of people don't understand it, but I do. He's special." Ask people in Jokic's inner circle and outside of it, from the NBA and from his hometown, and the answers are unsatisfying -- but tantalizing. That it all began in the smallest of gyms, where a young boy showed glimpses of what he'd later become: one of the greatest passers in NBA history.
"The thing is, we can only see the surface, but he is like a wide ocean inside," Vagic said."He's very excited, but you cannot see that, because he's under control."Branislav Vicentic was sitting in front of his computer in Belgrade, Serbia, in 2012. The head coach of Mega Vizura, an under-19 professional team that plays in Belgrade, was watching a youth basketball game between Vojvodina and Partizan, two teams in the Serbian under-19 league.
Jokic couldn't perform 10 situps or 10 pushups."I don't know if this is for real or if he's making a joke," the coach told Vicentic. So Vicentic asked Jokic, who admitted it's real.It began subtly. During a warmup drill for skill practice, Vicentic asked Jokic to engage in a two-ball dribbling drill, and Jokic took to it naturally, as if he'd done it all his life.
Milojević coached Jokic for 2½ years but struggled to convince people from the NBA that Jokic could play in the league. At the time, he said, Jokic simply didn'tlike an NBA player. One scout separately echoed that remark and said the first few times he saw Jokic play, back in 2012 and 2013, he didn't even write down his name.a 20-year-old aspiring scout living with his parents in Poland.
Two and a half months later, the team drafted Jokic with the 41st pick in the second round of the 2014 draft, famously announced during a Taco Bell commercial. Jokic was asleep at the time he was picked. The Nuggets stashed Jokic in the Adriatic League in the 2014-15 season, and he became the MVP in Serbia's top professional league.
"You could see that he had all these great ideas," Juc said,"but he didn't know how to translate it on the court."NBA draft, Jokic was in sunny Santa Barbara, California, to spend a month at P3 Applied Sports Science, a training center that specializes in advanced athlete assessment.
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