Black Guys Can’t Hoop

There was no reason to shade the truth when I wrote about Christian McCaffrey of the Carolina Panthers in 2020. I opined that he was then the top running back in the NFL and—on the basis of his first three seasons—the finest White runner the league had ever seen. (I acknowledged that in doing so, I was damning him with faint praise.) McCaffrey has since suffered injuries, been traded to the San Francisco 49ers and seen his stats trend downward. Nonetheless, I savored watching this tattoo-free young guy play. As stated in my article, I get sick of mono-cultural sports. Any all-black game is boring as well as alienating.

The rise of two more athletes of European descent has caught my attention, and the sport is basketball. Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić and Dallas Mavericks point guard Luka Dončić are currently the best basketball players on the planet. Neither, interestingly enough, was born in the USA.

Jokić is the older of the pair. A native of Sombor, Serbia, he stands 6′ 11″ and weighs 284 pounds. I will skip over his youth and early pro basketball days other than to state that he played for teams in the Adriatic League and the Serbian League. In the 2014 NBA draft, the Nuggets invested a second-round pick on Jokić; of the 40 guys chosen ahead of him, just one (Joel Embiid, taken No. 3 by the Philadelphia 76ers) has been what can be called a star. Jokić had one more year of seasoning in Europe before making the big jump to the NBA.

One wonders what basketball fans in the Mile-High City thought about their team picking a pale-skinned foreign player, but Jokić quickly showed that general manager Tim Connelly had chosen wisely. He earned a spot in the starting lineup and finished third in NBA rookie of the year voting. After leading Serbia to a silver medal in the (2016) Rio de Janeiro Olympics, he established himself as one of the NBA’s top players, and he has been nothing but hoops royalty ever since. Consider that Denver went a miserable 30-52 in 2015 for a .366 winning percentage. Jokić got there, and it has gone up to .488, .561, .659, .630, .653, .585 and .667 so far in the 2023 season. Need I tell you that he has been the main reason for the Nuggets’ climb toward the top?

Jokić made first-team all-NBA in 2019, 2021 and 2022, has played in the All-Star Game four times and has been league MVP the last two years. He took his team to the Western Conference finals in 2020. The Nuggets’ center is versatile, capable of scoring in the paint, and hitting mid-range jump shots, high-arching fade-aways and three-pointers. Furthermore, Jokić may be the best-passing big man in NBA history.

Durable in spite of thumb, ankle and wrist injuries, he has now played 557 NBA games. His average numbers look like this: 20.0 points, 10.4 rebounds and 6.4 assists. He has 82 career triple-doubles, having recently passed Wilt Chamberlain and trailing only LeBron James, Jason Kidd, Magic Johnson, Oscar Robertson and Russell Westbrook. Basketball cognoscenti think that only a serious injury would keep him from eventually reaching the summit of that list. He makes good money, having signed a five-year, $264 million contract extension in June 2022.

Let us now turn our attention to that other superb White player, Luka Dončic, who had 60 points, 21 rebounds and 10 assists in a Mavs overtime defeat of the New York Knicks a few days ago. He derives from Ljubljana, Slovenia, five hours west by car from Sombor. Family legend says that he first touched a basketball when he was seven months old. Dončic sailed through the various European leagues, winning championships and MVP trophies galore. Maybe some NBA execs wanted to be sure they did not miss out on the next Jokić because Dončic did not last too long in the 2018 draft. He ended up in Dallas after the Atlanta Hawks took him with the third overall pick and then swung a deal with the Mavs for guard Trae Young. Coach Rick Carlisle praised him as a probable franchise foundation piece, which sounds like typical draft-day blather. But he could not have foreseen the 6′ 7″, 230-pound Dončic being this good: rookie of the year in 2019 and all-NBA the last three seasons. Wearing the unusual No. 77 on his jersey, Dončic joined Chamberlain and Michael Jordan as the only players to score more than 800 points in their first 25 career playoff games. He already has 53 triple-doubles, so maybe Jokić is looking over his shoulder at the younger man.

Kidd, who replaced Carlisle in 2021, sometimes makes quips about how Dončic is boringly, consistently great. In 4 1/2 seasons, he has averaged 27.2 points, 8.6 rebounds and 8.0 assists per game. He has been a star for Dallas from the get-go. As a rookie, he was described by TV commentator Mark Jackson as a combination of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Dončic comes up big when the pressure is on, and how much more can you ask?

He is earning just over $37 million this year, which is not chump change. But Dončic is only the 18th best-paid player in the NBA. So his agent, Bill Duffy, needs to get cracking.

Like Jokić (who has the acceleration of your mother-in-law’s Toyota Prius), Dončic is not especially fast or much of a leaper; these guys seldom dunk. He makes up for that with basketball IQ and other intangibles. Jokić and Dončic, who are in a head-to-head battle for 2023 MVP honors, play a similar game. True, they lack the acrobatic creativity of Embiid, the raw strength of James, the dribbling talent of the Warriors’ Stephen Curry and the ability to streak from one end of the court to the other like the Bucks’ Giannis Antetokounmpo. And neither, to be honest, has been called a defensive whiz. But they have high basketball IQ and are not afraid to mix it up. They succeed with excellent footwork, going at their own pace, making smart plays and creating lucky breaks. They are highly skilled basketball players, that is for certain.

I think it is utterly delightful that two men of European descent have ascended to the top of the pro hoops world. Would that there were more.

Ljubljana’s favorite son….