Late last summer, Aleksandar Zigic was dining at a pizzeria in Belgrade, the capital city of Serbia, where it’s not unusual for him to be recognized by sports fans. As a U.S. correspondent for Serbia’s public broadcast network, he is one of the nation’s only media figures with regular access to its biggest basketball star.
But Zigic was particularly taken aback and amused when the manager of the restaurant, a man he’d never met before, interrupted his meal with a question.
“Why didn’t you persuade Nikola Jokic to go to the championship?”
Jokic had decided to sit out the 2023 FIBA World Cup, where Serbia won the silver medal. His absence from the national team was a side effect of the Nuggets’ first NBA championship in franchise history. They had competed into mid-June to earn a parade in Denver, making for an especially brief offseason even without international play.
“Fans get very emotional about it,” Zigic said.
That was only the beginning of a months-long cycle of national intrigue and media hoopla.
“It’s been one of the big questions in the country the whole year,” said Zigic, who is based in Chicago for Radio Television of Serbia (RTS). “Is Nikola going to be in the Olympics or not?”
The president of Serbia’s Olympic committee announced in October that Jokic was committed to playing, a claim that Jokic himself denied in an interview with Zigic early in the regular season. Even Jokic’s close friends were careful to give him space. Nuggets assistant coach Ognjen “Ogi” Stojakovic didn’t broach the topic until Denver’s season was over.
The answer, finally, is yes. Jokic has been traveling with the Serbian national team for its series of exhibition games this month in preparation for the Paris Olympics. This will mark his first participation in a major international tournament since EuroBasket 2022.
“Regardless of the fact that people are proud of everything that Jokic did in the NBA, here it is considered that the national team is above all,” Dusica Tasic, who hosts an RTS segment called “On the Road to Paris,” said via email.
That Jokic remained noncommittal the entire NBA season is indicative of the intense pressure he faces — pressure American superstars can’t even comprehend. Basketball fans in the U.S. are accustomed to dominance at the Olympics, enough to erode emotional investment in the national team. Team USA has won four consecutive gold medals and seven of the last eight. The Dream Team and Redeem Team are essential to the iconography of a traditionally American sport not because of what they endured in order to win, but much the opposite — the ease with which their talent overwhelmed opponents.
In Serbia, the sport is equally beloved — “like a religion,” Stojakovic is fond of saying — but even the modern powerhouses of European basketball remain a tier below the United States. Jokic is his national team’s only NBA All-Star. If religion is an appropriate analogy, then he is its deity. The prayers and ambitions of a nation rest on the scratched-up shoulders of a center from Sombor.
“It’s a big burden, because it’s kind of like, he’s the best basketball player in the world,” said Stojakovic, who has coached for Serbia since last summer. “People identify themselves with athletes and sports. They all have high expectations, especially for the national team. … There’s so much pressure on Nikola to play. And not just Nikola, for every athlete to play in all those big competitions.”
That’s why Stojakovic supported Jokic’s decision not to play last year. It’s why, this year, he “waited for basically the last moment to talk to him about Olympics” — only shifting his focus after the Nuggets had been eliminated from the playoffs. The 42-year-old coach believes in the importance of being sensitive to Jokic’s unique position.
“I’m trying to appreciate him as a person, as a friend,” Stojakovic said. “I know that Nikola felt bad because he was just not ready to play last year. Mentally exhausted. Physically exhausted. And I know how bad he felt because he wasn’t with the guys last summer.”
Indeed, Zigic attempted to explain to Serbian fans via his radio platform that Jokic cares deeply about playing for the national team, and that it couldn’t have been an easy decision to miss the World Cup. The NBA title run had simply taken a lot out of him.
“The funny thing is — I don’t know if it’s funny — but some people were happy the Nuggets didn’t go all the way this year,” Zigic said. “Because they thought, ‘OK, now he’s gonna have more time to rest after the NBA season, come to Serbia early, go to some horse races, and then focus on the Olympics.’ And that’s exactly what happened.”
The last time Jokic did play in the Olympics, he was 21 years old with zero MVP trophies. He had been an NBA starter for only half a season. Serbia returned home from Brazil with silver medals in 2016, a successful result even after the tournament ended with a 30-point loss to Team USA.
The context is entirely different eight years later. Jokic needs a trophy case for his accolades now. With him along for the ride, Serbia’s expectations are heightened. One media outlet’s reader survey has approximated that 37% of Serbian fans expect the national team to reach the final, while 23% expect to win gold in the 12-team tournament. Only 19% of voters expect the team to be eliminated in the quarterfinals or group stage.
National team head coach Svetislav Pesic is trying to keep the hype to a minimum, especially with Serbia scheduled to tip off the group stage against Team USA on July 28. Serbia’s first two exhibitions were held behind closed doors to keep a low profile. “Serbian media found out through Dutch media, the outcome,” Zigic said. Pesic has also publicly claimed the 2024 U.S. roster is better than the 1992 Dream Team, which he faced during the Olympics as Germany’s head coach at the time. (Team USA won, 111-68.)
“He asked journalists not to get the people over-excited,” Zigic said of Pesic. “He said the goal is to be second in the group, and then he said after that, there’s a difficult (quarterfinal) selection because Serbia will play against first or second (place) from another group. … Don’t get the people excited and don’t write a lot of articles saying, ‘Only Serbia can beat America in the Olympics.’”
Are those comments just gamesmanship? Is he hedging in preparation for the likely result of the group stage matchup? In an ominous tune-up exhibition last Wednesday, Team USA crushed Serbia 105-79 in Abu Dhabi.
“Although it seems that Jokic is not a magician and Serbia is not absolutely dominant with him,” Dasic said, “people in Serbia and journalists believe in miracles.”
In the meantime, Jokic hasn’t been giving interviews. When he arrived at the Belgrade hotel where he and his teammates assembled before training camp, cameras followed him from the car and through the hotel door, paparazzi-style. It’s all the extracurricular stuff Jokic disdains about his day job and aspires to escape every offseason when he returns home.
Why’s he willing to put up with the publicity this particular offseason? In the name of basketball and comradery.
“Everything is great,” Stojakovic said in a phone interview from Abu Dhabi. “And the reason I say that is because I can see how much (the players) love each other and how much they like to spend time with each other. Not just talking about basketball, but talking about friendship. Yes, it’s about winning, and yes, it’s about competing. But it’s also about friendship and doing something that’s going to stay with you all your life. From that standpoint, I think that everything’s going great.”
For Stojakovic personally, Serbia’s World Cup silver medal last summer was a dream come true. Now he gets to run it back on a grander stage, this time sharing the experience with one more close friend. (“We are spending so much time together,” he joked, “that I’d say it’s just like a regular day in the office.”) He’snot letting himself think too far ahead.
From a media perspective, even Zigic is hesitant to offer a prediction on Serbia’s fate in France. He’s unafraid of setting the standard for Jokic as an individual, though.
“I think he’ll do brilliantly at the Games,” Zigic said. “It’ll be amazing games from him. That’s what I expect right now from Nikola Jokic. It’s going to be something to remember each time he plays at the Olympics.”
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Originally Published: July 19, 2024 at 5:45 a.m.
