Serbia is a nation with a proud and distinguished basketball history. As we sit on the edge of Window 6 for the FIBA Basketball World Cup, the coming games against Estonia (Thursday, Feb 21) and Israel (Sunday Feb 24) will determine whether the nation will be travelling to China for the final tournament.
Needing just one win regardless of other results, Serbia are heavy favourites to qualify and take their place in China. Finishing second only to the USA in 2014’s FIBA Basketball World Cup, Serbian fans may now be dreaming of taking one step further. One of their potential key contributors is in the midst of a career-defining season out in Denver and was absent from that 2014 second-place finish.
The Denver metropolitan area houses nearly one hundred and fifty families that identify as Serbian, with a grand total of just over 1000 people. Many of them are related to the miners who traveled from the Balkans to Colorado in the Eighteenth century. Serbs were among the first Europeans to join the gold rush.
One Serbian Denver resident in particular has found gold, but in a very different way. Nikola Jokic is the starting center for the Denver Nuggets, a team that's finally come together after a few promising seasons, now eyeing a top spot in the playoff seeding. Today, the Nuggets are one of the NBA's leading teams, and they even sat in first place in the Western Conference until recently, in spite of the all-powerful Golden State Warriors.
Jokic is the team’s key player, and its most skilled one, on pace for a career year and in the midst of a season that has thrust his name into the MVP conversation. Thanks to his impressive statlines and the impact he has on every game, he's also just earned his first selection for the All Star Game.
But despite all these accolades, Nikola Jokic doesn't act like he's become an American all of a sudden. Every off-season he returns to his hometown of Sombor. The town has 85.000 inhabitants and sits near the border that divides Serbia, Croatia and Hungary. And if you want to know more about Jokic's bond with his motherland, just ask one of the Serbs living in the Denver community, and they will tell the story plainly. Many of them gather around St. John's Church, founded by Father Radovan Petrovic in 2016, where Nikola turns out to be a pretty common name for male newborns. It's the name of one the most prominent saints according to the Orthodox Church, sure, but more importantly, once they grow up the kids will be able to tell their friends “My name's Nikola, just like Jokic!”.
Of course church-going Serbs hold God in high regard, but since he doesn't play any sports, it can feel to outsiders that special Serbian athletes like Jokic sit above him in the ranking. The country is truly obsessed with sports, especially basketball, and in a good way. There's another Serb who lives in Denver and works in basketball. He's Ognjen Stojakovic, Assistant Coach for the Denver Nuggets, and he finds the best words to explain the issue. “At first, there was Novak Djokovic, and then God. But now we say: Nikola Jokic, Novak Djokovic, God”.
This bond between Jokic and Serbia, though, hasn’t always shone through his relationship with the national team. When it comes to professional athletes, business often overlaps with feelings. Jokic was a silver medalist in the amazing run Serbia enjoyed at the Rio 2016 Olympics, vanquishing every European opponent – along with an underdog Australia team – before giving USA Basketball a hard time in the final game.
That silver medal, he says, stands as “the greatest accomplishment of my career”; a feat he would love to repeat, because, still quoting his words: “I represent, first of all, my family, my city, and my country. I would like everybody who meets me to think that Serbia is a happy country, that my family is happy, that there are no negative things. Americans can come across as robotized, there is not much empathy, so I am trying to be different”.
Until he was 15 years old, when he first saw Michael Jordan and Hakeem Olajuwon's highlight reels on YouTube, he didn’t even think about becoming an NBA star. He dreamt of being a professional basketball player in Europe, and of wearing his national team's jersey. But then, the summer of 2017 happened. Jokic, by mutual agreement with the Nuggets, decided against joining Serbia for the upcoming EuroBasket to focus on the following NBA season.
It was quite a complicated period for him, recounts Jokic, and at times he even considered giving up with basketball altogether. Serbian fans made him hear about it, criticizing his choice – passionate as they are, they also have a quick temper.
Jokic is a very valuable asset for his national team, but the team doesn't depend on him to compete at the top level in the same way that Germany previously did with Nowitzki, or like Greece, in some ways, might do now with Antetokounmpo. The reason being, Serbia boasts such an amount of talent that they can explore the widest range of options just by looking at their local pool, before they even reach their NBA stars.
There's Bogdan Bogdanovic of the Sacramento Kings, sure, but there are Nikola Milutinov and Nemanja Nedovic too, playing for top European teams. Alongside these names, though, coach Sasha Djordjevic calls out Jokic as one of the key figures he envisions for the Serbian national team's future, both in the short term and in the long run. He's thinking 2020 Olympics and beyond, when they will offer guidance to a new wave of young players.
Serbia is close to punching a ticket for the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019, to be held in China next September, and Djordjevic has made up his mind, even though Jokic hasn’t participated in any of the qualifying windows and neither has he officially declared himself available for future endeavours: his coach will do anything in his power to have him on the team in China.
To understand how Serbia could most benefit from Nikola Jokic's presence on the floor, we need to imagine a scenario in which his skill set can be employed withinCoach Djordjevic's philosophy. Let's think about how his game is shaping up in the current NBA season – an MVP-caliber run.
Averaging more than 20 points, 10 rebounds and a staggering 7 assists per game, Jokic is having his best season to date, still keeping up with his usual shooting percentages – 50% from the field and 30% from three-point range where he averages 3.6 attempts per game. His vivid imagination as a playmaker is known worldwide by now, thanks to his astonishing, no-look and behind-the-back assists showing up in every mixtape.
Jokic developed a strong connection with his teammates as soon as he arrived in Denver, and he's able to foresee their movements away from the ball in order to reward their cuts to the basket with pinpoint accuracy. It is also worth noting that Jokic's passing prowess is not just flashy: it's designed to be the main cog in coach Mike Malone's system. Jokic is averaging a career high Usage rate of 27.6. This means that he has the ball in his hands a huge amount of the time, and he's free to call sets and see them develop on the floor.
He goes to work in the usual spots for a center, posting up at the elbow or deep down low, but he's also able to expand his shooting range outside the three point line, where he frequently acts as a guard, even running the fastbreak when he's required to.
In the first situation, even though the offense slows down in the paint, he creates spaces for his teammates to work with, thanks to his passing skills and court vision: the defense is baited to collapse close to the basket, but players in single coverage must be aware of every off-ball movement of the opponent they're guarding, knowing that Jokic will punish double teams with precise timing.
On the perimeter, he's able to free himself up, drawing from his repertoire of fakes and ball handling tricks: they're both at an elite level for a big man, and help him overcome his relative lack of acceleration in a league of elite athletes. Jokic follows the footstep of great European big men like Arvydas Sabonis, relying on a strong set of fundamentals. If you have those, and Jokic is here to prove it, you can play “positional basketball” even outside of your customary spot in the paint.
Jokic, as a center, is better suited to play in the contemporary NBA than what appears at first glance. He carries around a massive frame and he's not a quick leaper by any means (he’s recorded more triple doubles – 10, chasing Russell Westbrook for the first spot – than dunks – 7), he's somewhat slow, although surprisingly nimble on his feet.
Nonetheless, Jokic can stand his ground despite the current small ball trend, fighting off hyper-athletic and lightning-fast opponents thanks to two particular reasons. Number one: Denver sports a team defense designed to help him perform at his best, without leaving him at the mercy of faster swingmen – he's improving his fitness and mobility (thankfully giving up with that three-liters-of-coke-per-day habit), and Denver ranks sixth in the league for points allowed and fifteenth in defensive rating.
Number two: Jokic puts together the perks of being an old-school center with the variety of offensive weapons that comes with the evolution of NBA's big men, making his whole team more dangerous in the process. Jokic is one of the few NBA players still able to discourage opposing teams from going small. When facing smaller and lighter defenders, even if they're strong and athletic, he's able to move them close to the basket and then put up shots with good percentages (68% in the immediate vicinity of the basket, 52% in the paint) thanks to his silky smooth release and a set of grown-man moves. All the more impressive given his young age.
When challenged to a physical game, Jokic becomes a different player. He puts away his weapon of choice to dish no-look assists and fake drives to the basket. Most of the time he scores on contested layups, off balance, fighting for position with his off-arm, and he often collects his own miss and shoots again from point blank range (he grabs 2.9 offensive rebounds per game, 10% of those available).
This very skill should turn out to be extremely useful when he'll come back to play for Serbia, allowing him to bang down low against the stifling FIBA defenses. The smaller international courts will grant him some relief too, and being allowed to stay in the lane defensively will play towards his old school game. Like Jokic himself said, in the piece he authored for The Players' Tribune: “You’ve seen a few times when other players pull me or grab my leg. I love that kind of play on the basketball court. This is just how we play in Serbia”.
On the flip side of the coin, on offense he won't enjoy the same freedom the Nuggets have made him accustomed to. He’ll likely play on the perimeter less frequently, mostly just when he has pick and pop opportunities from three point range. He’ll likely also have fewer opportunities to take full control of the offense. The Serbian national team will travel to China with a roster full of clever, experienced all-around players, and Sasha Djordjevic will eventually benefit from Jokic's playmaking habits, asking him to look for his teammates' routes and cuts.
Narrower lines and slower games usually lead to more accuracy and thought needed for the passing game. Nikola Jokic seems to be up to the task, and Serbia waits for him to resume their common path. A path to China for the FIBA Basketball World Cup 2019, where the Serbian National team will be looking to replicate their success at the 2016 Olympic basketball tournament.