While the basketball finals are being played in the United States, there is a 28-year-old Serbian who never tires of making masterful passes, scoring and assists to his teammates, the Colorado Denver Nuggets. A player who seems to have no ceiling and who seeks to win the first ring in history for those of the Western Conference.
First modification:
He is a different player. He is 2.11 meters tall and as soon as the television cameras show the attack of the Denverians, you can see the thick physical frame of this man born in Sombor, Serbia, making passes or simply misleading the opposing defenders with his body.
And it is that the best athletes in the world are always recognized for their great abilities and skills in the field they dominate. Michael Phelps, considered the best swimmer of all time because of his speed in the water; Lionel Messi, the Argentine star who won everything with his prodigious left foot; Usain Bolt, the Jamaican who ran at almost the speed of light, but if we talk about Jokic, why is he hogging everyone’s attention? What is the magic of this European who is astonishing fans, experts and even his own teammates?
The center that is reinventing the NBA
He is not American, nor of Afro descent, he is not thin and oddly enough, he is not the fastest in games. One might think that a player with these characteristics could not succeed in one of the highest level basketball competitions in the world, but this is a case totally removed from the generic.
Nikola Jokic receives with his back to the basket and it is just at that moment that one begins to see all his qualities. With the ball in his hands, he turns his trunk from one side to the other, with all the serenity that his more than 200 centimeters of height allow him, and waits for his teammates to stand out and ask for the pass.
There does not seem to be any stress or despair in his game, quite the contrary, he is a piece of the team that transmits calm and perhaps that is the key that has allowed him to be declared the most valuable player in the NBA twice. For his first coach, Dejan Milojević, who is now an assistant at the Golden State Warriors, Nikola has the field of play on his mind and although he may seem slow from the outside, he knows perfectly well how to analyze where his teammates are, what is the next step and how Give the next pitch.
Jokic’s extraordinary numbers
He began his professional career at the age of 17 in his native country, with physical problems, which forced him to have a conditioning plan strong enough to make him what he is today. He was selected in the draft by the Denver Nuggets in 2014 and once again food and health were the topic of conversation, due to his taste for Coca-Cola, according to what the player declared in an interview with the ESPN channel.
Currently, he weighs 129 kilos and according to statistics, he is the second heaviest player of all NBA rosters, as much as the 32.4 million dollars he earns per season.
How many players have converted 500 points and 150 assists in a season? Well, in an exclusive and reduced list the name of this ‘Serbian giant’ already appears alongside figures such as LeBron James -who achieved this record six times-, Russell Westbrook and other basketball legends such as Isaiah Thomas, Larry Bird and Jerry West.
The fact of being a pivot is just a small label for the player and figure of those from Colorado. In the third game of the final against the Miami team, the numbers once again had Jokic’s last name: 32 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists. Which means he had 30 or more touchdowns, 20 or more rebounds and 10 or more scoring passes. He is the first player in the finals to achieve such a triple double.
“For the record I’m not so happy. I’m happy because we won the game. We didn’t want to lose in the series, we wanted to win,” Jokic said, after Game 3 of the Finals against the Heat.
In the playoffs he also gave rise to talk, as he broke a new record: he registered the most triple-doubles in a single postseason. This occurred in Denver’s fourth game against the Los Angeles Lakers, when he reached a total of eight triple-doubles. To gauge what happened, it is enough to review that the last time an NBA player achieved these numbers was in 1967 in the hands of Wilt Chamberlain.
The Olympic silver medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics now wants to go for the collective achievement, lead the Denver Nuggets to win the first NBA title in their entire history. Will he get it? We will know on June 18 or before if Nikola Jokic has led his team to close the series before Game 7.
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