I'm All in on Balkan-born Basketball Players. Please Join Me in the Celebration

I'll be the first person to say that I typically don't care for foreign born players with rare exceptions, very few of which I actually like before they enter the league.  The only of which that I can think of is Luka Doncic himself, and that took 3 years of absolutely dominating grown men before I was really confident in his ability.  And only after making easy work of pretty much every defense he's come up against am I now 100% sold.  Luka is the absolute truth and there is no denying it, which is why exactly zero people are trying to deny it.  In fact everyone is completely fawning over the kid, and rightfully so.  But in all that hoopla, people are forgetting to heap praise on a few of his Balkan-born brothers in arms: Nikola Jokic, Nikola Vucevic, and Jusuf Nurkic.  I am honored to be able to do so now.


Let's start with Jokic in Denver.  Where to even begin?  He's one of the most absurdly skilled 7 footers I've ever seen, let's start there.  Strong enough to back defenders down from the free throw line with a soft enough tough to drain 3s.  Even more impressive is his passing ability.  In true euroball fashion, Jokic has an extremely well rounded offensive game but even for a European, he has an amazing ability to create for other players and he does it with crafty little array of ball fakes which help him to shift an manipulate the defense without actually moving.  Skill wise, he's got it all and he stuffs a stat sheet like nobody's business.

Add into that the fact that he got fined $25,000 for innocently saying "no homo" about Wendell Carter being longer than him, and his ability to make unarguably the funniest dumb faces in the league.  Plus he's an effort guy.  You need that guy.

Next up is Nikola Vucevic in Orlando.  No offense to Vucevic, but we're going to keep this short and sweet because any time I spend more than a couple minutes talking/thinking about inland Florida I start to sink into a real deep, dark depression.  It goes without saying but that state really is trash.  I don't want to go into it too much, but interior Florida is basically a giant landfill that was filled up with horrible people, reptiles, and insects instead of garbage.  Garbage would have been better.  With that being said Vucevic is having one helluva year for the Magic.  Much like Jokic, he features a extremely versatile skill set and although he doesn't quite facilitate on the same level, he's still got some nifty passes in the tool bag, not to mention his ability to knock down 38% of his shots from deep - invaluable in today's game.  Bangs in the post and can stretch it out and drawn a defender to either hit the jumper or open up lanes.  Hopefully he gets traded to literally anywhere else on earth.

And finally we have the very man who inspired this blog: Jusuf Nurkic.  I know what you're going to say: "Nurkic isn't nearly as good as those other three."  You're absolutely right.  Sure, he's probably the second best defender of the bunch, but offensively those other three players are just on a different level and have a lot more weapons in their arsenal.  That's not to say Nurkic isn't good, he's definitely a quality little player and at 24, he still has a few solid years of improvement ahead of him.  But he's not making this list because of his abilities on the court, he's making it because he absolutely ethered Iman Shumpert in his postgame interview last night after the two got into a little scuffle following a hard screen by Nurkic.  When told that Shump waited outside the Blazers locker room to have a word, young Jusuf had this to say:

“I’m not worried about it. He’s going into retirement soon. I just said what I said. I‘m not worried about a guy who’s going into retirement soon.”


Iman Shumpert is 28 years old and has only been in the league 3 years longer than Nurkic. 


Game: Jusuf