Nikola Jokić
Nikola Jokić is the best passing center in NBA history, which is a strong enough claim that it can stand alone before the rest of the résumé. Three MVPs (2020–21, 2021–22, 2023–24). One NBA championship, one Finals MVP, one Western Conference Player of the Year award from 2019 onward that he did not win. He is also, for what it is worth, the only recent NBA MVP to run a horse-trainer operation as his primary off-season activity, not as a hobby but as a full business. Both of those sentences are true. The second one is part of how to understand the first one.
Sombor
He was born February 19, 1995, in Sombor, a small city in northwestern Serbia near the Hungarian border. He is the youngest of three brothers; the older two, Strahinja and Nemanja Jokić, both played college basketball in the United States (Strahinja at Detroit, Nemanja at Florida A&M and later the University of Detroit-Mercy). The extended Jokić family home in Sombor had, according to every Serbian basketball reporter who has visited, a barn, several horses, and a cellar that the three brothers used as a shared bedroom for most of their childhood.
He was not a basketball prodigy as a younger teenager in the way the talent-pipeline writers now describe him. He was slow. He was overweight. He did not crack the rotation of his hometown club Vojvodina’s senior team until he was almost sixteen, and he was not considered a European youth-team-level player at all until Mega Basket’s Belgrade academy signed him in 2012, at seventeen.
Mega Basket and the 2014 NBA Draft
His two seasons at Mega Basket (2013–14 and 2014–15) in the Serbian first division and the Adriatic League are the ones the Denver Nuggets’ scouting staff watched on compilation reel before the 2014 NBA Draft. Denver took him 41st overall on June 26, 2014, the 11th pick of the second round, in a draft class whose first round included Andrew Wiggins, Jabari Parker, Joel Embiid, Zach LaVine, and Marcus Smart. The pick was announced late in the draft on ESPN; the broadcast cut away from it mid-sentence to go to a Taco Bell commercial. The “Taco Bell pick” line is the most-repeated fact about his draft night. It is also true.
The first two Nuggets seasons (2015–17)
He did not come over to Denver for the 2014–15 season; he stayed in Belgrade for one more year. He debuted in the NBA on October 28, 2015, against Houston, coming off the bench for thirteen minutes and recording a rebound and an assist. He was named to the All-Rookie First Team that season (10.0 points, 7.0 rebounds, 2.4 assists a game in 21.7 minutes) but was not considered a league-wide talking point. Denver was 33–49. The first Western Conference Player of the Month award of his career came in December 2016.
Three MVPs (2020–21, 2021–22, 2023–24)
He is one of twelve players in NBA history to win at least three regular-season Most Valuable Player awards. The list is: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (6), Bill Russell (5), Michael Jordan (5), LeBron James (4), Wilt Chamberlain (4), Moses Malone (3), Larry Bird (3), Magic Johnson (3), Nikola Jokić (3). The absence of Shaquille O’Neal, Kobe Bryant, Tim Duncan, and Stephen Curry from that list, all Hall of Famers, all inner-circle top-twenty players, is the cleanest single indicator of what three MVPs actually means.
His statistical line across the three MVP seasons: 26.9 points, 13.3 rebounds, and 8.6 assists a game, on 58 percent shooting and 36 percent from three, with 1.5 steals a game. No other center in league history has averaged a line like that over any single MVP season, never mind three. The passing rate is the defining metric. His per-100-possessions assist figure was higher than Magic Johnson’s peak year three times over, from a position that traditionally sees ball movement go through it rather than out of it.
The 2023 championship
Denver won the 2022–23 NBA title on June 12, 2023, beating the Miami Heat in five games in the Finals. Jokić was the Finals MVP. His line across the five-game series: 30.2 points, 14.0 rebounds, 7.2 assists a game. The Game 3 triple-double (32 points, 21 rebounds, 10 assists) was the single most statistically dominant game in NBA Finals history by some composite metrics. The championship ended a 47-year wait for the Nuggets’ first NBA title.
The supporting cast, Jamal Murray at point guard, Michael Porter Jr. at small forward, Aaron Gordon at power forward, and Kentavious Caldwell-Pope at shooting guard, was a conventional five in every respect except its spacing philosophy, which was built around the basic gravity of the Jokić high-post two-man game.
The horse-trainer side of his life
He has said, repeatedly, that basketball is the second-most important thing in his life. The first is horses. His off-season is spent in Sombor at the family stable training trotters and driving them in harness races. He has won multiple Serbian harness-racing championships since 2019. The horses are not a sidebar. They are the structure of his summer, the reason he declines most international exhibition commitments, and the subject he talks about most openly in interviews when asked about how he handles fame.
This is worth saying because the absence of a full American-style celebrity media presence around him is not a communications strategy. It is that he is, on any given August day, driving a two-horse sulky at a Serbian provincial track. His teammate Murray, asked at the 2023 Finals what the off-season would look like, joked that Jokić would have his Finals MVP trophy “somewhere behind a saddle by Wednesday.”
Team Serbia and Olympic bronze
He led Serbia to the bronze medal at the 2024 Paris Olympics, with a semifinal loss to the United States and a bronze-medal win over Germany. He averaged 17.3 points, 9.0 rebounds, and 8.7 assists a game across the tournament. Serbia had not won an Olympic basketball medal since 2016, when he was injured.
Legacy (through age 31)
He is already the best player in the history of the Denver Nuggets franchise by any conceivable metric. He is already among the top-five centers in NBA history by the statistical tools most front offices use in roster construction. The remaining legacy question, whether he ends up in the top-three-centers-ever conversation with Kareem, Wilt, Hakeem, Shaq, Russell, Duncan (power forward by position but sometimes grouped), and Moses, is the question that the next four or five Denver seasons will answer. Bill Simmons laid out the framework for that comparison in The Book of Basketball (Ballantine, 2009), and Jokić’s statistical footprint has already exceeded the benchmarks Simmons set for the top-ten-center threshold. The center of the case for yes is that he has already achieved, in his age-26 through age-30 seasons, what two or three of those players achieved in their whole careers.
Gear
Shop official Nikola Jokić jerseys and Nuggets fan gear on Fanatics.
Sources
- Basketball-Reference, Nikola Jokić career page (per-game, per-100, and MVP-season splits)
- NBA Communications, Most Valuable Player announcements (2020–21, 2021–22, 2023–24)
- ESPN, 2014 NBA Draft telecast (second-round selection 41 overall by Denver; the broadcast break often summarized as the “Taco Bell pick”)
- Sam Amick, The Athletic, “How Nikola Jokić became the NBA’s most unique MVP” (2022) (Mega Basket signing, early-Denver scouting archive)
- Miami Heat vs Denver Nuggets 2023 NBA Finals box scores; Finals MVP vote release, June 12, 2023
- Serbian Harness Racing Federation, results archive, Sombor (2019 onward) (training-and-driving record)
- FIBA tournament report, 2024 Paris Olympic men’s basketball (Serbia bronze, Jokić tournament averages)
- Bleacher Report, 2022 long-form feature on the Jokić family stable in Sombor
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