There are many players in the league who call themselves tough guys, some are really tough, and some are just bullying soft and afraid of hard masters.
If NBA players are now allowed to vote for the players who are most reluctant to clash with each other on the court, black belt captain Johnson should be at the top.
However, if this proposition had been made five or six years ago, Nikola Pekkovic would have been on the list, I don't know if you still have much of an impression of this player.
Originally from Montenegro, Nicola Pekkovic entered the professional basketball arena in 2003 when he was just 17 years old. He has played in the national leagues of Montenegro, Serbia and Greece and has won many league titles.
Experience in the Europa League has given him the opportunity to knock on the NBA door, the Timberwolves in the 2008 draft, has the second round of the first pick to select Nicola Pefkovic, 2010 officially signed the team, landed in the NBA.
Pekovic, wearing the No. 14 Timberwolves jersey, became the Timberwolves' inner pillar. Pekovic's biggest advantage is his physique, 2 meters 11 tall, weighing 139 kilograms, so he is also called "Montenegro White Bear" by fans.
His outstanding strength gave him a good explosive power, and he was aggressive on both ends of the attack, but at the same time the feel was not bad, and the sense of position under the basket was excellent, which was definitely a nightmare for most centers at that time.
At his peak, Warcraft Howard once said this about Pekovic, his hulk is simply a mixed martial arts player, he is more powerful than me.
In an interview yesterday, Draymond also said that Perkovic was the strongest person he had ever held in his life. In Zhuang Shen's view, when he is in opposition to Pekovic, he is like a small child, who can be pushed around at will, and he can't stop the former from hitting the inside line in the back.
Pekovic not only made his opponents fearful, but even his teammates were a little afraid of him. LaVine, who was drafted by the Timberwolves in 14 years, wanted to continue wearing the no. 14 jersey after entering the NBA, but when he saw Perkovic wearing the no. 14 jersey, he didn't even dare to ask about the number.
What makes him a little frightened lies in two details. He had seen Pekovich boxing in the locker room, sweating profusely, slamming into sandbags.
He had also seen the former's meals staggering. He described Pekovich as a stone made of muscles.
On the field, Pekovic has a short but decent NBA career. In April 2013, Pekovic won the Western Conference Of the Week best for his outstanding performance, one of the few honors of his career.
That season, he averaged 16.3 points and 8.8 rebounds per game, shooting 52 percent from the field, a performance that also impressed timberwolves management, who chose to renew his contract in the summer of 2013, with a contract worth $60 million for five years.
After getting another big contract and only playing good games for one year, he was reimbursed for an ankle injury in 2015 and played only 12 games in the 2016 season. Never returned to the field, and in the summer of 2017, the Timberwolves officially announced the layoff of Nicola Perkovic.
Looking back at Nicola Pekovic's six-year NBA career, being big is his biggest advantage in the field, but it has also become the cause of ankle injury and the reason for ending his NBA career prematurely.
Even so, he is luckier than most players, earning more than $60 million in a six-year NBA career.
His experience in the NBA is not the most legendary place in his life, but the most amazing thing for fans is his life after retirement.
In Montenegro, with a population of only 630,000, Pekovic's family is quite powerful in the local area and in neighboring Serbia, and if you put it bluntly, their family is a well-known local gang.
After retiring from the military, Pekovich naturally inherited the family business, ran some of the family's business, and was rumored last year that he was investigated for drug trafficking. In such a family, it is doomed to live an ordinary and stable life.
Some NBA players choose to be farmers after retirement, some NBA players enter the business world after retiring, some NBA players go home to inherit the "big business", everyone has everyone's life, some people return to the ordinary, some people yearn for legends, and each writes a different life.