For most, Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić’s rise to being the top player in professional basketball came out of nowhere.
The repeat NBA Most Valuable Player award-winner and NBA champion was drafted in the second round of the NBA draft and went overlooked by every team in the league. But, some around him saw his potential and now the rest is history.
Former Denver Post reporter Mike Singer, who covered the Nuggets for five seasons during Jokić’s rise in professional basketball, interviewed dozens of those early believers to piece together the backstory of basketball’s most mysterious superstar.
Here are three takeaways from his conversation on Colorado Matters about his new book: “Why So Serious? The untold story of NBA champion Nikola Jokić”
On Jokić’s hometown of Sombor, Serbia:
Mike Singer: “It's so quaint, it's so peaceful, it's so insulated, it's so protective and it's kind of in the heart of nature. It just all makes sense. I get why he has such a grounded personality and just kind of has his priorities straight. The one night we were there, we had somehow run into — everybody knows everybody — we had run into some of Nikola's earliest friends, and then we saw them at the bar that night. There's only a handful of bars, and then we end up just going out with Nikola’s friends, back-and-forth to multiple bars until two or three in the morning, and I felt really, really privileged to get what that looked like.”
On why the traditional scouting process missed on Jokić
Singer: “Maybe we weren't measuring the right stuff or maybe we didn't have the capacity to measure his strengths. Given the stars in the NBA right now — and I'm alluding to the very elite in Nikola and Luka Doncic and even Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, all three of those guys, they are very good at decelerating. They are very balanced, they are very coordinated. They're not huge injury risks. There's all these tells there that maybe we weren't prioritizing because they're harder to measure. One of my favorite chapters in the book is when Nikola went to P3 in Santa Barbara and (they) basically studied all these metrics of symmetry and balance and jump mechanics and basically deduced that he was an extremely coordinated and balanced and healthy athlete, if that makes sense. I'm not sure that scouts, to bring this back were fully attuned to what we're necessarily looking for.”
“How are you supposed to know or quantify — specifically if there's never been a player like Nikola — then what's the precedent here in terms of knowing that this guy is going to translate to the NBA? From a very macro standpoint, I think if you were to ask Nikola one thing that he's most proud of in his career — and obviously his career is not over with — I think among the highlights would be the fact that he has made talent evaluators adjust how they evaluate the game because of the fact that just because somebody doesn't ‘look the part’ doesn't necessarily mean that there's not a three-time MVP, potential four-time MVP lying beneath the surface.”
On Jokić’s attitude toward phones and social media
“It is important to Nikola to not have your phones at the meal because he wants you to engage. He wants you to invest in the conversation. He wants you to be present and be there and lean into each other. He's a fantastic example of what can happen when you don't concern yourself with what people think of you, what your online presence is ... He pours into the people around him and they in turn pour into him back.”
