Emmanuel Mudiay was supposed to be their next franchise star as their lottery pick in the 2015 draft, and Nurkic was supposed to be their big man of the future. The Nuggets were content on building through the draft. Denver had successfully worked its way out of the blockbuster Carmelo Anthony trade to start the decade, but the group that had won 57 games a few years earlier was a shell of itself after Andre Iguodala left for the Warriors and head coach George Karl was fired. Jokic came stateside the next year to a Nuggets team in transition. Jokic was named MVP of the Adriatic League at 19 years old, igniting hope that Denver might have found a steal with their draft-and-stash. Instead, he returned to his club in Belgrade and went from a talented teenager to one of the best players in Europe. Jokic never planned on coming over to the NBA right after he was drafted. Photo by Joe Murphy/NBAE via Getty Images Put more simply, he’s the best basketball player in the world. What is Nikola Jokic? He’s a little Shaq, a little Dirk, a little Magic, a little Arvydas Sabonis. He’s a skilled ball handler in the open floor, a deft scorer in the post, and he has a sixth sense for seeing how a play will develop before it actually happens. He just shot 46.1 percent from three throughout the Nuggets’ run in the 2023 playoffs. He’s one of the league’s best rebounders. All the attention on Jokic’s playmaking sometimes threatens to take away from the other parts of his game. Calling him the best passing big man of all-time is selling him a bit short: he’s one of the best passers ever, regardless of position. Jokic is arguably the biggest and strongest player in the NBA - no one in the league is listed heavier than his 284 pounds. He still looks nothing like traditional superstar, but his skill set is both more complete and more calibrated for this era of the sport than any player of his generation. The Denver Nuggets’ 2023 championship was a true team effort, but Jokic was the singular force of nature who made it possible. When Denver finally came on the clock in round two, their selection of Jokic was announced during a Taco Bell commercial.Įight seasons later, Jokic stands alone on the NBA mountaintop. The second round of the draft is hardly ever a spot to find a quality starter, let alone a superstar. The Nuggets had two first round picks that year after pulling off a trade with the Chicago Bulls, and they used the first one to draft a different international big man in Jusuf Nurkic. Denver did not exactly see him as their center of the future. Pre-draft scouting reports compared Jokic to Pero Antic. When Jokic’s advisor put out a tweet saying his client would pull out of the draft and return to Vizura, the Nuggets made the greatest second round promise in league history to ensure he didn’t file the paperwork. The Denver Nuggets were intrigued by what they saw on tape, if not entirely sold. Jokic was chubby, slow, and gravity-bound. Basketball players are supposed to be long, lean, and fast, with springs in their legs. He was drinking three liters of soda per day, eating “cheese pies” for breakfast, and he couldn’t do one push-up. Jokic showed up to his first pro gig at Mega Vizura weighing 300 lbs. As he was leaving home in the northern part of Serbia to enter the 2014 NBA Draft, Jokic told teams exactly who he was: a “fat point guard.” Jokic himself might be the only person to effectively do it. Putting a label on Nikola Jokic’s game has long been a nearly impossible challenge for evaluators.
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