Moments after the Denver Nuggets finished off the Miami Heat in Game 5 of the 2023 finals to clinch their first NBA championship in franchise history, Nikola Jokic—the series MVP—was itching to catch a flight to Serbia. “I have to go home,” he said.
He did stick around the United States for a few days, attending the championship parade, where he declared, “I f–cking want to stay on parade, this is the best.” He and his teammates went to Vegas that night, and when then-Nugget Bruce Brown woke up hungover and missed his flight out of Sin City, he laid blame on the Serbian superstar.
“I want everyone to know, this is Nikola Jokic fault that I’m down this bad,” Brown said on Instagram live. “I don’t know what he had me drinking last night.”
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Awaiting Jokic in Sombor, his hometown tucked in the northwest of the country, was the summer of Jokic, a few months of grand celebration. The town erected a billboard—“Welcome Home, MVP”—in his honor, with a picture of two horses in his foreground. (He’s a horse-racing enthusiast.) Jokic, who’s 6 ft. 11 in., danced on a chair one night. He danced with a gold trophy on another night after one of his horses won a race. He again danced on a chair in August and looked 8 ft. tall compared to the people around him.
If there were music and chairs in some Sombor cafe or nightclub, odds are, Jokic was towering over a crowd and getting down.
He rode a bike around town and received a visit from teammate Aaron Gordon, whom he took to the race track. He stopped off at a convenience store in Bosnia to buy a beer on a way to a rafting trip on the Tara river, where onlookers serenaded him with “MVP” chants as he floated down the water. He cooled off by front-flipping off the raft into the river, which is known for having strong currents.
Per ESPN, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich caught that clip and called Denver coach Michael Malone. “What the hell is your guy doing?” Popovich asked about Jokic, according to Malone. “I’ve been in that river, man. What is he, crazy?”
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Jokic sang shirtless in July. He sang shirtless in September. Those were just the times captured on camera.
Once the NBA season resumed, a clever TikToker mashed up Jokic’s racing, rafting, and partying clips with those of NBA stars working out. Jokic claimed he touched a basketball “a couple of times” last summer (though he did lift weights and stick to a conditioning plan).
Overall, the regiment worked well: Jokic won this third MVP, in four seasons, this year.
The summer of 2024, however, will be different. Jokic, for the second time, is an Olympian, joining LeBron James, Joel Embiid, Stephen Curry, Giannis Antetokounmpo, Victor Wembanyama, and others in a high-wattage men’s basketball competition in France. Serbia and the United States open their Olympic tournament with a highly anticipated June 28 group-stage clash, in Lille, north of Paris.
After making the NBA all-rookie team in the 2016, Jokic destroyed the U.S. in a near-upset in the group stage at the Rio Olympics, scoring 25 points and grabbing six rebounds in a 94-91 loss. U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski gushed about Jokic after the game. While the U.S. met Serbia again in the gold-medal game and won easily, 96-66, by 2019 Jokic was an NBA All-Star.
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But it’s been a mixed bag for Serbia, with and without Jokic, in recent years. He played for his country in the 2019 FIBA Basketball World Cup, in China, but Serbia lost to Argentina in the quarterfinals. Coming off his first MVP season in 2021, Jokic did not join the Serbian national team for Tokyo Games qualifying, and Serbia, the defending Olympic silver medalists, failed to even make the tournament. He did suit up for Serbia at EuroBasket 2022 and led the team in scoring, but Italy knocked out Serbia at those championships in the round of 16. And after a long run into the playoffs last season, and a summer of fun, few international hoops junkies were surprised when Jokic skipped last year’s World Cup in Japan. Serbia won silver without him.
Jokic now faces pressure to deliver a medal, at least, at the Paris Games. While the Serbian roster is not as stacked with NBA talent as that of the U.S., or even Canada or France, the team’s historically fluid offensive attack, with Jokic throwing deft passes in the middle, has proved difficult to stop. Bogdan Bogdanovic, of the Atlanta Hawks, is a scoring threat on any level: his absence, due to injury, at the 2022 European tournament hurt Serbia. Now he and Jokic are teamed up, again, for the Olympics. And they’re more experienced and decorated players now than when they won silver eight years ago.
If Jokic can somehow lead Serbia to gold, he’ll settle any lingering argument about his status as the best basketball player in the world.
And you may not see his shirt for a month.
