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ESPN Daily

Nikola Jokic: From Dad Bod God to NBA MVP

ESPN Daily

ESPN

Sports

4.63.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The NBA Finals begin tonight, with the Denver Nuggets on the league’s biggest stage for the first time ever. They are led by Nikola Jokic, the two-time MVP who has built a case to be called the greatest player in the world. So today, with his team hosting the Miami Heat in game one, Ramona Shelburne explains how the always humble Jokic evolved from a pudgy, soda-chugging teenager in Serbia to the playmaking center that’s changing the game as we know it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

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0:11.2

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0:15.6

Ramona, Shelburne, you're here to tell us about someone we should know pretty well, but

0:19.7

for whatever reason we don't. And that's NBA Finals participant Nicoli Yokic. It's almost

0:25.4

impossible to talk about him Ramona without at least mentioning that he doesn't have

0:29.5

a never has had. And I want to say this is delicately as possible. The prototypical pro

0:34.7

athletes body. What's the reputation of Yokic's physique or even his athleticism around the league?

0:41.3

So Nicoli Yokic has this reputation and probably it was well founded in the beginning because

0:48.1

he came over and his reputation was kind of a flabby guy. He played very slowly and the

0:54.5

pace that he would, he would play the game at miss didn't necessarily mean he needed

0:58.6

to be in phenomenal shape. Early in his career, he tended to play his way into shape, which

1:05.3

is a euphemism that we have in the league of that's what training campus for. That is

1:10.8

what the first quarter of the season is for is to get into shape. And you know, that

1:15.9

can work if you want to have an average NBA career or even an above average NBA career

1:20.7

because he was so skilled. But his first few years in the league, he was not known as

1:26.2

a workout feed. A lot of his coaches in Denver would say you kind of hard on him and say,

1:31.0

come on, man, you got to, you got to tighten up a little bit. You got to, you got to take

1:35.5

this seriously. And he, I think he understood what they were saying. But until he saw the evidence

1:42.8

that what he had been doing in the past wasn't working, he wasn't going to change.

1:48.2

Okay, so in your piece today about Yokeich, you mentioned in a game that he did receive that

1:54.6

evidence. It was in 2019, Yokeich's first season as an all star, the nuggets were in the Western

2:00.5

Conference semifinals against Portland Trailblazers. What happened there?

...

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