By Eurohoops Team/ info@eurohoops.net
The incredible story of Nikola Jokic’s discovery is already known to everyone. His agent Misko Raznatovic revealed that Jokic was the first and only player who was signed by him without anyone having seen him play in person before the deal. However, there were those who saw him in action in 2012 before the two-time NBA MVP was on anyone’s radar.
It was the coaching staff from Vojvodina who took a chance on him and the club from the city of Novi Sad is where the newly crowned NBA champion took his first steps in the junior competition.
“It was August 2012. Nikola was 17 years old at that moment, and still, nobody in the Serbian basketball community had any idea that he existed. He’s not a 12 or 13-year-old kid that someone could miss, he was 17 and practically didn’t exist“, Igor Kovacevic said to MozzartSport, then general manager of Vojvodina from Novi Sad back in 2012.
And Kovacevic himself didn’t have a clear grasp of who Jokic was: “To be honest, I was not GM at that moment, I was with the club, but a few months later I officially became the general manager when Nikola was there. He was first spotted by coach Ljuba Anicic on a concrete playground in Sombor, and when Nikola came to us, he couldn’t run two laps around the court, but that talent, those hands, it’s was incredible. He came to Vojvodina, and we started working with him. After that Misko Raznatovic heard about him, Nikola then went to his team, Mega, and the rest is history“.
The crazy stats lines of Nikola Jokic in Vojvodina started to make waves in Serbian basketball. All of a sudden there were rumors about some unknown kid who was able to deliver over 30 points against his peers from local powerhouses like Crvena Zvezda and Partizan.
As Kovacevic himself explains: “It’s great for him that he went to Mega. He got a chance to prove himself, to play basketball. Who knows what would have happened if he had gone somewhere else and how his career would have gone.”
When you see numbers like 38 points and 19 rebounds in the statistical columns, it’s no wonder that the biggest clubs in Serbia, start calling.
However, Jokic and Raznatovic had bigger plans and Kovacevic admits that they were right: “After signing with Misko, he only thought about Mega, and that was a good move on his part”.
Plus even in Serbia, there were doubts about him: “I know how Partizan’s scouts told (ed. note: legendary talent groomer) coach Dule Vujosevic that Jokic had no commitment and that he was fat, and that was why Partizan didn’t want him because Dusko realistically at that time couldn’t do scouting. Who knows what would have happened if he had seen him in person? Also, Nebojsa Covic and Crvena Zvezda were very interested. In the end, Mega turned out to be an ideal environment for him“.
But, before Mega in Belgrade, Jokic played with great success in Vojvodina even if it was just a short period of time.
“In order for a kid to grow and become mature, it is necessary to open up space for him, to give him a chance, and Ljuba, the junior coach who saw him back in Sombor, played a key role in this. When I think only of those shouts from the stands of other parents. Ljuba remained consistent, he saw that there is a kid who has talent and quality, call him, ask… he knows best what it looked like in those days in Novi Sad”, added Kovacevic
The Serbian media tracked down Ljuba Anicic who is now working in China.
As he explained: “I saw him at some random game, I was in the stands, and a talented child just caught my eye. I realized very quickly that no one knew about him, Was it someone’s mistake or they simply didn’t think he was good? I don’t know, but I liked the way he looked on the court. Since we knew his brother Strahinja, who had already stopped playing, we agreed to bring Nikola to Novi Sad to join the junior team which lacked a center anyway”.
Soon, Nikola, who was still a teenager, started playing against much older players.
“At that time, the juniors could also play in the first Serbian league with the senior roster. Nikola outplayed them too, with jokes, feints, and some trickery“.
It didn’t take much time for everyone in Vojvodina to realize that they had something special in their hands.
“First it became clear to me that he has an extraordinary sense of the game”, says Anicic, who now states the obvious, but more than a decade ago things were not that simple.
As he explains: “What stood out the most were his fast and long hands. Every ball on the court was his, while, for example, his legs were a problem. They are quite slow, they were back then and still are not the fastest in the world. That was a question mark in his game and something that could possibly prevent him from being a professional player on the top level, but simply those strengths of his came to the forefront so much, so they started and those games of 30 points and 20 rebounds, indexes of 50 or 60. Nobody could stop him and that was it.”
And as they say, the rest is history…