Marc Gasol recently sat down with the Out The Mud Podcast and gave fans an incredible behind-the-scenes look at the first time he encountered Nikola Jokic—long before the Serbian center became a two-time MVP and arguably the most complete big man of his era.
As it turns out, Gasol’s first introduction wasn’t with Nikola himself, but with his famously animated brothers at a wedding for another Serbian basketball icon: Darko Milicic.
“So let me tell you a story about Nikola. I first met his brothers. So I’m at a wedding in Serbia. So I’m at Darko Milicic’s wedding, and I see these two guys… we’re celebrating, so we’re all happy, and we’re all into it.”
“And they said, ‘Hey man, you know, I got a brother that plays like you.’ I said, ‘Okay.’ ‘He’s very good. He’s very talented.’ I said, ‘Nice. I hope he does great.’ And cheers, and took some rakia and kept on going.”
“So I think like two or three years later, we’re playing in Denver, I’m warming up, and I see two guys coming down the stairs and they just scream, ‘Marc, Marc.’ I look up, ‘Hey s**t, what are they doing here?'”
“And they say, ‘That’s my brother.’ I turn, and it was Nikola Jokic. I’m like, ‘Ah, that’s who you were talking about.’ And I already told him he’s nice for real. Because at that time, you remember, I don’t know if you remember, like him and Jusuf Nurkic, they were playing for minutes, right?”
“And they didn’t know who to play. And Nikola said, like, ‘You know what, let Jusuf play. I don’t care. Like, bring me off the bench. Play Nurkic as a starter.’ And they played Nikola, and Nikola flourished and became, I think, one of the all-time greats in that position.”
“So I love watching him play. I see some of the resemblance to the things that he does, especially his reads. I just love the usage. The usage is like, there’s no play that he don’t touch the ball.”
“Like, ‘Hey, we don’t know what to do,’ they throw the ball to him, and everything just starts happening. So for me to see a franchise be successful and trust a guy like Nikola for that long and be, you know, productive, I love it. I love it.”
“You can’t play him one-on-one. Guys now are not that big to play him one-on-one anyways. So he’s going to get you down to the basket and start using his body. I think I’ve never seen a touch like that around the basket, like so effective in different angles.”
“Like, you know, he has hands like Z-Bo but with the right hand, right? Like, how the f**k he made that? And then you can’t double team him because he’s going to find the open guy every time.”
From sharing rakia with the Jokic brothers at a wedding to watching Nikola dominate as the hub of Denver’s offense, Marc Gasol’s story is a full-circle testament to the magic of basketball and the rise of a generational talent he recognized even before the rest of the world caught on.
