In last year's shortest offseason in NBA history, Jokic returned to his hometown of Serbia, where he had a small wedding, ended a long-distance love run with his girlfriend Natalia, and walked into a happy marriage hall side by side.
At the wedding, he invited his young coach, Dejan Minojevic. Ten years ago, when Jokic was an unknown player playing for Mega in the Adriatic League, Minojevic was his coach. He watched Jokic step by step go from an obscure little fat man to the NBA superstar he is today. To this day, the veteran coach, who is still coaching Inga, remembers how he felt when he first met the scout from Novi Sad.
"This kid is gasping for breath after two steps, and he's really too fat."
It's no surprise, if a person wants to drink 3 liters of Coke a day, it's impossible for him not to be fat. Mega's training intensity is very high, Minojevic is afraid of injuring Jokic, he assigned a team's physical coach to be Jokic's personal trainer, in addition to taking him to practice every day, but also responsible for controlling his diet, a month later, he allowed Jokic to join the youth team of Thegah. But just half a year later, the guy who only played the youth league for half a year got the MVP of the youth league.
The approach to developing players in the Former Yugoslavia is different from anywhere else in the world. 40 years before "positional ambiguity" became the dominant idea in the NBA, Professor Alexander Nikovich was already using a similar philosophy to nurture young basketball players in the Balkans. Serbian basketball players train together regardless of position at a young age, and all athletes have to be proficient in every technical aspect. They don't need to tie themselves down and tell themselves how a center, striker or defender should play, they just need to learn how to play when they're facing, side-facing, and back-to-back to the basket. Coaches teach players techniques and strategies and encourage them to understand on their own what kind of technical moves should be used at what time. In such an advanced basketball concept, from the original Divac to today's Pokuszewski, Serbia, with only 8.7 million people, has produced as many as 24 NBA players in these years.
Jokic, on the other hand, is undoubtedly the top prodigy who can best embody this basketball philosophy on the court. In the Mega youth team, he finished first in shooting training, first in dribbling training, and first in passing training. Such talent stunned Megar Youth Coach Vicentic, who is accustomed to young talents: "Once, we had to carry out a difficult training session in which we controlled two balls with both hands to alternately complete complex dribbling movements. Even an experienced point guard often struggles to get through this training, but Jokic did all the training tasks flawlessly in the first training session, and I always suspected that he practiced it in private, but he really didn't, and can only say that his talent is amazing. ”
The following year, the 18-year-old Jokic became a member of the Mega Adult Team. Minojevic went straight into charge of his training. Minojevic is a small 201 cm centre-forward who has won three Adriatic League MVPs. After spending time with Jokic, he discovered the most valuable quality in Jokic: slowness.
"He's not a very common kind of athlete. In basketball, all atypical things have some advantage. While most of the players played at speed A, Nikolai played at speed B. Many people feel that being faster than others is an advantage, but slower speed can also make opponents uncomfortable. For an athlete like him, the lesson in rate is just the basics, and once a creative player like him learns to really think outside the box, the defender's nightmare begins. ”
When Jokic learned how to enjoy his slow-paced game, he progressed as fast as the wind. Three weeks into the first team, Jokic was added to the team's rotation. A few more weeks later, he became the team's starter. At the end of the season, he won both best rookie and MVP in the Adriatic League. At that point, scouts from the NBA began to pay attention to him.
June 26, 2014, was a memorable day for the Nuggets. Although when the Nuggets selected him, the tv broadcast was still interspersed with burritos ads, and Jokic was still asleep in his Serbian home.
That day went well for the Nuggets, who picked Doug McDermott with the 11th pick and then traded him down to get the draft picks with the 16th and 19th picks, where they picked Gary Harris and Nurkic. They also have a 41-pick pick.
Jokic may have been the brightest rising star in the Adriatic League, but he was only a nameless man in the world basketball landscape at the time. He was once given the opportunity to present himself in front of a large number of American scouts, which was the Nike Pinnacle in 2014. But after the game, most American scouts didn't like him. Both Dante Axam and Bismarck Byombo, who became the top 10 picks with their nike pinnacles, are the types that scouts like: tall, slender, and athleticistic, all of which are visible to the naked eye. Jokic's 5 points and 7 rebounds in the 15th minute were not noticeable at all, and many American scouts wrote down his comments in small books: too slow, too soft, one-on-one to prevent elite interior lines like Jalil Okafor or Towns, and it couldn't prevent the demolition at all.
A big reason the Denver Nuggets picked him with the 41st pick was related to his agent, Raznatović. Raznatović, Serbia's most powerful agent and owner of The Mega team, opened a brokerage firm called BeoBasket, and his client, Frenchman Joffrey Lovelje, was selected by the Nuggets in 2013, when Raznatović impressed Connery.
"I enjoyed the interaction with Raznatović when I selected Lovelje. He trusted me and I recognized his abilities. So when he recommended Nikolai (Jovic) to us, we thought about the child very seriously. He didn't have very good athleticism and didn't look like he was shooting well, but our scouts liked his basketball IQ and his style of play. He's the kind of player who's very selfless and doesn't care much about his personal data, so we feel he can be a good substitute for Nurkic. ”
When Nuggets president Tim Connery reflected on the day that completely changed the history of the Denver Nuggets, he admitted that luck was on his side: "It may be unfair to other teams to be selected with the 41st pick Jokic, but we can only say that we were really lucky. ”
There has always been a theory that people have always had doubts about Jokic's offensive abilities and desires. ESPN's data analyst Fran Fraschina described this skepticism this way: "Jokic's basketball culture is formed on the basis of selflessness and team supremacy, and that's what he's been trained for, this's 'socialist' basketball, and he's willing to share everything." But in some games, when he doesn't have a helper and needs to figure everything out on his own, people doubt his ability to step out of his comfort zone. ”
In the first round of this year's playoffs, Jokic played against the guy he had substituted for. Nurkic has his self-esteem and he does everything he can to get Jokic in trouble, but as the series progresses, Jokic finds a way to beat Nurkic. He efficiently jumped high, cunningly changing defensive positions, luring Nurkic into foul traps at both ends of the line. Nurkic has committed as many as 30 fouls in the six-game series, with three of them being sent off. At the same time, Jokic has become the MVP of this season. He hit back with a series of 62.7 percent true shooting and 33.0 points per game that hit back at those who said his individual offense was lackluster.
This season, Jokic has advanced to the next level. Grizzlies fans will remember how he led the team to victory in a game of 47 points, 15 rebounds and 8 assists in double overtime against the Grizzlies, and from the end of the game to overtime, he responded to every score of the Grizzlies until he saw blood in the final three points; New York fans will also remember how when Thibodeau encouraged the team to strangle the Nuggets' outside score points and insisted on not including Jokic, he played a stunning score of "Jokic 24-12 Knicks" in the first quarter, destroying his opponent in one fell swoop. In the first five seasons of his career, he had four games with 40+ points, but this season he had five. He really carried the team on his shoulders.
Just two months into the start of the 2020-21 season, Minojevic felt that his lover might win the MVP: "He is stronger every year than the previous year, and now is the best time for Nikola (Jokic). He knows how much he can do on the pitch and how he can help the team win. As long as he knew this, no one could stop him. ”
Yesterday, the NBA officially announced that Jokic became the MVP of the league. He won 91 of the 101 first votes, and became the first Serbian MVP in NBA history, the first MVP of the Nuggets, the MVP with the lowest draft pick in history, the first center MVP of the 21st century... This list can be listed longer, but for fans who have watched Jokic play this season, it is really unnecessary to prove Jokic's greatness through these false names.
He's a European, a second-round show, a physique that doesn't look like an elite athlete even now, coming from a small market team, all of which have given him enough prejudice, but his performances this season have been impeccable and have earned him respect from the media and fans. Embiid, Curry, Paul, Alphabet Brother... They all played phenomenal seasons, but in terms of performances this season, Jokic was indeed the best.
He had been at full speed from the first day of the season and nothing difficult had slowed him down. When Michael Porter Jr. missed 10 games because of the coronavirus, he dominated almost every game and led the Nuggets out of the mire; when Jamal Murray, Will Barton and P.J. Dozier were all absent due to injury, he single-handedly ran the team's offense and did not let the team go high and low. Before the playoffs, a lot of people — including me — thought the guard line of Austin Rivers, Shaquille Harrison, Marcus Howard and Monte Morris wouldn't be a two-shot Fraysers, but what was the result? These NBA fringe men have all played a dazzling performance in this series, and Jokic has brought them to the second round of the playoffs. The Nuggets kept coming down injured, but Jokic stayed on. Nuggets fans have reason to believe that as long as the guy in the Nuggets' No. 15 shirt stands on the court, the Nuggets have the hope of beating any opponent.
From the overweight, two-step guy on the Mega youth team to the NBA's iron man who is full-time and third in total playing time this season, it's hard to imagine what's happened to Jokic over the years. When he put down his Coke bottle and walked into the gym after each game, he had proven how true the phrase "every fat guy is a potential stock" really has to be.
What does the future hold for Jokic and the Nuggets? It's hard to make predictions. Will this be the last MVP he will earn in his career? Will he be able to lead the Nuggets to a championship in the future? It's hard to give a definitive answer, but in any case, we shouldn't forget one thing Jokic's career has already told us: Everyone who ever underestimated him is now punched in the face by him.