In 2014, an NBA team drafted a chubby Serbian teenager 41st overall — and the moment aired under a Taco Bell commercial. A decade later he was the best basketball player alive.
The story starts in Sombor, a farm town in northern Serbia, in a two-bedroom apartment shared by six people. Nikola was the youngest of three brothers — the other two a decade older, and a decade bigger.
He couldn't overpower his brothers, so he learned to outthink them — passing, angles, seeing the play before it happened. That's the whole player, formed in a driveway. He also fell in love with something most kids never touch: harness racing. Horses, not hoops, were his first obsession.
As a pro teenager for Mega Basket, he was raw and overweight — 1.8 points a game on the junior team. Two years later he was the best young player in the Adriatic League, its MVP at nineteen. The body was behind. The mind was already there.
Denver took a flyer on him in the second round. He arrived a 10-point rookie nobody feared — then climbed, season by season, into something the sport had never quite seen: a seven-foot center running the entire offense like a point guard.
Three MVP awards came in four years. Then, in 2023, the whole thing paid off — an NBA championship and Finals MVP, delivered by the man everyone had overlooked. The Joker, on top of the world, still looking like he'd rather be at the barn.
And in 2025-26 he did something no one in history had done — led the entire league in both rebounds and assists while averaging a triple-double. Yet he lost the MVP to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and got knocked out in the first round. The greatest player alive, still searching for the right team around him.
Off the court he's exactly who he was in Sombor: married to his high-school sweetheart, a daughter he calls the best thing that ever happened to him, and a stable of horses waiting each summer. He says he wants to stay in Denver for the rest of his career. The bargain of the century, still being paid off.