The Ringer NBA Show - The Balkan Basketball Boom

Episode Date: February 21, 2023

In this special audio feature, Ringer senior staff writer Jordan Ritter Conn traveled to the Balkans to answer one simple question: How are so many of the world’s greatest basketball players—including two-time MVP Nikola Jokic and potential future MVP Luka Doncic—coming from such a small region? Interviews with current and former NBA players, as well as scouts and coaches in the region, peel back the layers of the rise and sustained success of the Balkan "basketball school.” Host: Jordan Ritter Conn Producers: Mallory Rubin, Justin Verrier, Bobby Wagner, and Vikram Patel Sound Design, Mixing, and Mastering: Bobby Wagner Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's up everybody? It's Austin Rivers from the Minnesota Timberwolves. It's a new year and I have a new podcast here at the Ringer, Offguard, hosted by me and my guide Pasha Higigi. Austin and I go way back and talk so much hoop already that we figure those time to fire up the mics and let you in on all of these conversations. Every week, Pasha and I will hit on the biggest stories happening in the league. And get Austin's perspective of someone currently hooping in the NBA.

Tap into OffGuard every Friday on the Ringer NBA show feed on Spotify or wherever you get your podcast. It's a Tuesday afternoon in September. I'm in Belgrade, Serbia, walking through the neighborhood of Racha. Everywhere I look, there are open-air cafes, graffitied walls, and it's hot. I'm sweaty and in a hurry. I'm heading to a meeting with a man named Surgeon Radoyevich. I came to Serbia looking for a complicated answer to a very simple question, and I was told that Surgeon, the Zach Lowe of Serbia, as one NBA assistant coach called him, could help me find

what I needed. Yeah, Surgeon, hi. How's it going, man? How are you? Good, how are you? I'm reading something. We're outside a coffee shop near Surgeon's home, tucked down a little side street,

away from the commotion of the city. He's with his wife and their baby. Jordan, so nice to see you. Oh, wow. My son. Hi. Nicola. Nicola.

Wonderful. Surgeon is quick to point out that his son is not actually named after two-time NBA MVP Nikola Yokic. But, I told everyone from the NBA front offices, I know when they ask me, what is the surname? I said the second most common name in NBA after Jalen. Oh, wow.

Is that really true? I don't know. But you have Yokic Wutchevich, now Yovic. All named Nikola, all from this part of the world. More specifically, the Balkan Peninsula. And more specifically than that, the countries that once made up Yugoslavia before it split apart in the 1990s. But the NBA's balk and boom goes well beyond that.

Dragich, Nurkich, Sarich, Marjanovich, multiple Bogdanovich and many more. Players from Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro dot rosters all across the NBA. In all, the league has 14 players from the former Yugoslavia. And the two most famous, of course, are Yokic and Luca Dantzic. The Slovenian, who seems all but certain to someday follow in Yokic's footsteps as the next balkiner to win NBA MVP. These are small countries. If you combine the populations of all of the former Yugoslavian countries, they're still smaller than the state of Florida.

Yet it seems like you can't watch an NBA game without seeing at least one player whose last name ends with itch. And so, the reason I'm here is to find answers to a very simple question. Why? I'm Jordan Ritter-Kahn, a senior staff writer at The Ringer. And for this special episode of the Ringer NBA show, we're going to do something a little different. I tried to figure out how the former Yugoslavia has produced so many great basketball players, including two of the five best in the world.

To do that, I spent two weeks traveling through four countries, and I also talked with as many Balkan NBA players as I could, including Yusuf Nurkic. I think we're probably wrong. You have MEPs from their region now. and Bogdan Bogdanovich. It's a small country, and we have big dreams. I asked players, coaches, fans, and journalists different versions of the same question.

Why are there so many good basketball players from the Balkans? To understand how we got here, let's start at the beginning. Yugoslavia became a country in 1918, emerging out of World War I. Within a few years, workers from the Red Cross had begun teaching basketball to school children, in Belgrade. As decades past, the Yugoslavian government invested a lot in team sports as a way to build national pride. But basketball really took off, in part because people are really tall here, which we'll get to later. By the 1960s, the Yugoslavian basketball team was consistently competing for medals in both the European and world championships. This history is really,

really important to people who love basketball in this region. People like Milos Giovanovich, a journalist based in Belgrade. The big thing for Americans, when they're coming over to Belgrade and to the region and trying to understand Serbia and Balkan basketball better, Yugoslav basketball better, is that they have to understand that Yokic, Donchich, and all the great players

didn't just happen. They are the latest, you know, tree branch in a story in an ancient tree, which has been bearing fruit for seven decades by now. Igor Krakoskov, an assistant coach with the Nets and former head coach of the Sons, is a Serbian native with deep roots in the region's basketball culture. You know, I think the world of basketball recommends only three basketball schools.

Here, he's using a phrase I hear over and over again, basketball school. He's talking about the very specific ways in which the game has been taught. He says the American basketball school is the obvious first one, the most dominant. But after that? It was Soviet Union and Yugoslavian. The Yugoslavian basketball school. It's defined by a relentless drilling of fundamentals and by an emphasis on positionless basketball.

Big men learning guard skills, that sort of thing. But it's more than that. The work ethic was incredible. In the 1970s, Yugoslavia produced its first golden generation. None of these players came to the end. NBA. The league wasn't scouting Europe very much. And besides, Yugoslavia liked to keep its top athletes in Yugoslavia. The country had laws discouraging citizens from moving abroad. Also, remember, until 1992, NBA players were ineligible to play in the Olympics or the World Championships

or any other FIBA competition. And these competitions meant everything to Yugoslavians. If they chased their dream in the NBA, they gave up their dream of winning glory for their country. That strategy of keeping talent at home really worked. Yugoslavia won the World Championship, now called the Feeba World Cup, in 1970 and 1978, and won three straight European championships in 73, 75, and 77. Milosh, the journalist, is 42 years old. He grew up watching another Yugoslavia and golden generation. The one that emerged after the group of players who dominated the 70s started to retire.

There was one great generation. So when they petered out, another great generation with Drajan Petrovich, Tony Kukovych, Dino Rajah, Vlade Divac, Sasha Danilovic, Sasha Georgievich, and other great players started to blossom. All six of those guys went on to play in the NBA. Four of them are in the Naismith Hall of Fame. That generation really started to show what it was capable, of back when they were teenagers in the 80s.

Kukoch, Raja, Diva, and Georgievich all played together on a youth national team. So did Samir Avditch. They collect us from each countries of ex-Yoslavia. I mean, it was the first step. So in the three and a half years, we never lose any game. A couple days after I meet Samir and Sarajevo, I drive to Zagreb, where I get coffee with Dino Raja. A former NBA big, you might remember from his time with the Celtics in the 90s.

We met at this cafe outside a shopping mall. Roger remembers playing for that youth team and not really having any clue just how good they were. Yeah, we were friends. We were buddies. We play cards. We play soccer. We have fun. We enjoy spending time with each other.

You know, you have to go back 30 plus years. We're happy to be able to play in a heated gym instead of being outside on the cold. They went to Bormio, Italy to play in the under-19 world championships in 1987. And they just started dominating everyone from everywhere. Their biggest competition was a United States team, coached by Larry Brown, led by future NBA stars Gary Payton and Larry Johnson. Yugoslavia beat the Americans once in the group stage and again in the gold medal game,

both times by double digits. A few years later, the Americans would send NBA players to the Olympics, you know, the whole dream team thing, in large part because they were tired of losing to teams like Yugoslavia. I have to say that I'm very proud to be part of the generation, part of the process, part of something that made Americans change their mind,

of sending, you know, college kids. And then, just four years later in 1991, Yugoslavia began to fall apart. A ceasefire is in place in Yugoslavia after two days of fighting that took more than 100 lives. Good evening. We begin with overseas news tonight. It appears that the violent tactics of the Yugoslav army have forced the Bush administration to change its mind.

Truist talks between federal officials and the Republic of Slovenia broke down again today. The countries that made up Yugoslavia fought a number of wars in the 1990s. You can't tell the story of basketball in this part of the world without exploring some of that history. To keep it as simple as possible,

there are several different ethnic and religious groups in the region. Ethnic Serbs tend to be Orthodox Christian, ethnic Croats tend to be Catholic, and much of Bosnia is Muslim. They speak essentially the same language with a few dialectical differences, but that language is

called Serbian or Croatian or Bosnian, depending on where you are. Over the course of the region's history, a number of politicians used those ethnic and religious differences to foment conflict and to seek power for themselves. On June 25, 1991, both Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence. The Yugoslavian army fought a very short war with Slovenia, literally called the 10-day war, before letting that country go independent. That didn't happen in Croatia. The war there lasted four years.

Or in Bosnia, where a war began in 1992 and lasted three years. Later, in the 90s and early 2000s, conflict erupted in Kosovo and Macedonia, too. In all, more than 140,000 people died in what are now called the Yugoslav wars. For basketball players in this region, just like for everyone else, this violence turned their lives completely upside down. That Yugoslavian youth team featuring all those Future Hall of Famers, it drew players from all across the Balkans. But now Dino Raja, Tony Kukovych and Drozhen Petrovich were playing for their new country, Croatia. Sitting at that cafe in Zagreb, I asked Dino about it.

Unfortunately, my country was split by war and that is not something, something. that's fun, you know, even to talk about. So it was huge responsibility on our shoulders, not only as basketball players, but nobody in that time knew about the war. The war in Croatia was not getting the kind of international media attention you might expect. Imagine a little Croatia and Serbia,

Serbia, who cares about that? So we had a responsibility to show people that something is happening here, that we are a new nation. So it was a great deal, really, for everybody. Huge deal. Yugoslavia didn't qualify for the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, but Croatia did. That meant Dino and others would be playing for their new nation. It also meant they'd be playing without their friends. and teammates from the country against whom they were now fighting a war.

Croatia won the silver medal in Barcelona, losing to the Dream Team by 33 points in the group stage and by 32 in the gold medal game. And while it clearly meant so much to Dino to be able to represent his young country, he couldn't help but wonder what it would have been like to play the U.S. with all of the teammates he'd grown up with at the youth level. I don't say we would beat them, but we would give them much harder time

if we had a couple more guys to be able to play. I can tell you with certainty that if we will stay together, that team in the future would be like European champion forever, and I think everybody else would quit playing basketball. Back in Serbia, Milos Giovanovich was a child, watching those Olympics at home while his country fall to war against Croatia that he didn't fully understand. The country breaks up.

We never get to find out what would happen against the dream team. We would lose, of course, but we still wanted to see that game happening. Croatians had that dream come true. We didn't. But that's something people have brought up to me a lot, is wondering what it would have been like had Yugoslavia still been intact in 1992, just to see it, just to see it. The U.S. would win. I have no doubts about that. I mean, if you're trying to stake your claim against Michael Jordan, Larry Byrne, you know, Chris Mullin, Scottie Pippen, you know, Magic Johnson, all the great players of the age, and you're saying, yeah, we can beat them. That's a, you know.

But all of us, and I speak not only for myself, but I speak forever, all of us want to see how it looked like. We felt we had a shot. You know, maybe for 15 minutes, maybe for a half, maybe for three quorches, but we felt we had a shot. And the fact we never had that shot hurts. So you might be asking yourself, how did Yugoslavia get so good that multiple people I talked to thought they had a shot to hang with the dream team? You know, the team with 23 combined NBA championship rings, the one that regularly blew out teams by 50 in the 92 Olympics. Well, I did too, and that's kind of why I came here. There's the work ethic, Igor mentioned, the two-a-day practices that became the norm, and several other reasons we'll get to in a bit.

But the most obvious reason is the simplest. This part of Europe is known for really tall people. They're exceptionally tall people in that part of the world. We already kind of have the advantage of height. You can't teach height. Spend a day walking the streets of any city in this region, and you notice it. I'm 6'5, and walking around Belgrade on that first day, I see a lot of people taller than me.

The average Serbian man is 511, 2 inches taller than the average American man. Down in Montenegro, which recently laid claim is the tallest country in the world, that numbers an inch higher. The average Montenegrin man is taller than 81% of American men. Boyan Bogdanovich, a nine-year NBA veteran, thinks that means basketball becomes sort of a birth rate. We are also pretty, pretty tall nation-like. We kind of bored to play. But height alone can't explain basketball talent. The Netherlands is the second tallest country in the world.

That country produced Rick Smiths, the 7-4 center who played for the Pacers in the 90s. But it hasn't had a player in the NBA in a decade. It also matters how that height is taught. Here's a trivia question. Over the last decade, which team has been? teams, international or domestic, have produced the most NBA draft picks. The first two are gimmies, Duke and Kentucky.

Arizona's third, but number four on the list is in a Blue Blood American University or a traditional European powerhouse. It's a small club called Mega Basket, based here in Belgrade. Mega's an unconventional club. According to a number of reports and my own conversations with people close to the club, it is essentially controlled by Mishko Riznatsovich, a Serbian super agent. A couple of people described him to me as the most powerful man in European basketball. He represents many of the players who come through Mega's ranks, including Yokic,

Boban, and Zubats. The biggest clubs in Serbia, Red Star and Partisan, aspire year in and year out to win the Euro League, competing with Spanish teams like Real Madrid and Barcelona, Olympiacos of Greece, and Finnerbache of Turkey. Mega isn't really concerned with competing at that level. Instead, the club focuses on nurturing young talent. They jokingly call themselves the Kentucky of Europe. European clubs can be ruthless, firing coaches and cutting players at the first sign of trouble.

But Mega, Zubat says, has more patience and more emphasis on player development. They focus so much on your individual stuff, like they want to develop you as a player. They're going to give you a lot of chances. They're going to let you make mistakes in the games. And I feel like when you mix that with playing against professional players and playing a good league, that opportunity makes you a lot better. You know, you don't have that pressure where if you have a more mistake, you're going to be benched for the rest of the game.

A couple nights after I arrived in Belgrade, I'm in a gym in a neighborhood called New Belgrade. for a preseason game between mega and a select team from overtime elite, which is an American post-grad league that includes multiple first-round prospects. As tip-off approaches, the stands are pretty empty. Down by the court, though, there's a flurry of commotion. A group of men come in through a VIP entrance, and they greet each other in English and Spanish, Italian, and Serbian. Many are wearing polo shirts bearing the logos of NBA teams.

Thunder, Spurs, Nuggets, Blazers, all scouts. It's like a scene out of the Netflix movie Hustle, minus Adam Sandler. There are nearly 40 scouts here, and at least one NBA general manager. There aren't quite as many NBA personnel as there are fans, but it's close. They're here to see a few prospects, including yet another Nikola, Jurisich, who plays for Mega and who ESPN has pegged is a late first round. in 2023. Before the game, I sit down with Goran Chakic, Mega's general manager. Chakic is 42 years old, and he's tall, 6'10. During his playing career, he bounced all over

Europe, but he ended his career right here at Mega, suiting up with a 17-year-old prospect named Nikola Yokic. Physically, Yokic was deeply unimpressive. Tall, sure, but weak, and a little chubby. He famously had to cut back on eating Burek. the savory pastries that you can find on damn near every street corner in Belgrade and other cities around the region. But still. From beginning, he was unbelievable talented. And this move what he had, that was, you cannot learn.

We didn't learn him that. Yeah. He had that things and everything. On the other case, he was just a hit. Most of Yokic's basketball genius is pure talent, a set of innate attributes that Yokic would have had no matter where he was born. be it in his hometown of Sambor, Serbia, or his new home, Colorado. But there's something about Yokic's game that feels distinctly, well, Balkan.

Above all else, players from this region are known for being big men who can shoot and pass and handle the ball, who know how to play in the post but feel comfortable on the perimeter. While Yokic is a uniquely gifted player, he reminds Serbians of players from previous generations. Surgeon saw it the first time he watched Yokic play. and I compare him to Divats. I said, this guy is smart like Divats, high basketball IQ like Divats, finding all those moves, finding all those teammates on every spot on the court. And he reminds me a lot of Divats.

And the people told me on Twitter, oh, man, take it easy, take it easy, you know. That skill set is developed by design. That's Kokoshkab again. He came of age as a player and a coach in Yugoslavia, and he remembers an intentional effort to make sure big men developed guard skills. Regardless, in the center, it doesn't matter. He has his skills sense got to be, you know, on the second level. And the standards were very high.

For example, even the center should be able to pad, triple, handleable, which was at that time, it was very unique. You know, nobody else was doing that at that time. contrast that to the United States, where historically, if you're tall, you get your ass down to the post. That's starting to change now as the game has opened up, but in the Balkans, they've been developing talent that way for decades. Even in other parts of Europe, this is rare. At the megagame, I met Nico Mathieu, a Parisian who works as a scout for the Trailblazers. In France, we don't have the technical side like they have here.

mostly if you're tall, you will be close to the rim. But I don't know if it's right or not, but I feel like these guys, they have all the same fundamentals, no matter what the size or the position. I asked a couple of people why this is. What is it about the culture or just the general coaching philosophy that led to seven-footers learning point guard skills all the way back in the 70s?

I couldn't get a definitive answer. A couple of people pointed to Yugoslavia's communist past, this egalitarianism of every player learning every skill, all of it in this highly structured, disciplined kind of way. Zubats just said he learned the game that way because he grew up in a tiny town, and everyone had to play every position because there weren't that many players. Among Americans, you won't find many people who are greater connoisseurs of Balkan basketball than Fran Fraschilla, the ESPN draft analyst and longtime calls. college coach. All of their big guys have always, you know, at least the guys that become really good players have always been very skilled because everybody does the same drills. You know, everybody handles a ball, dribbles, it, passes, it, shoots it. And that's why you have guys like Yokic at 7 foot one doing what they do because they were all brought up to play the game,

not by position, but here are the key fundamentals. And by the way, you're going to listen to the coach. It's just the Serbian way. I talked about this with Samiravditch. He remembers a youth coach who he calls his professor, putting him and his teammates through a very particular drill. Professor Slavko Turninich push us, you know, to make dribble with the tennis ball, and after that, push us with a normal ball.

They tell us, we are doing this because you will not lose. ball never never big men running through ball handling drills with a tennis ball in the 80s he also remembers scrimmages where the coaches would stop the game and make everyone switch positions centers played point guard and point guards played center the idea was that every player should intimately understand every role on the court should be able to float from one position to the next without missing a single beat after decades of

growth and development, the region's basketball infrastructure split apart at the same time Yugoslavia did. That first golden generation came up under one flag. The next generation, today's generation, was born into the destruction caused by Yugoslavia's fracture and came of age in their own brand new countries before rising all the way to the NBA. When I leave Belgrade, I drive south through the Dinar Mountains, across the border into Bosphorus. Bosnian Herzegovina, all the way down to Sarajevo. It's situated in this gorgeous valley, and as you walk down its ancient streets, you see the minarets rising from mosques just before you, and the mountains rising just beyond the city.

This country is smaller than Serbia and Croatia, and it's poorer than both of those countries and Slovenia. This past summer, the Bosnians almost had to drop out of Eurobasket, because the Federation could barely scrape together enough money to send a team. but there's talent here. Both of Vitsa Zubats and Boyaam Bogdanovich play for the Croatian national team, but were born in Mostar, a couple hours to the south. The trailblazers Yusuf Nurkits is from Tuzla, a couple hours north of Sarajevo.

Bosnia has talent, size, and toughness. I mean, most of our younger guys, what I'm saying, after the 90s, you know, after the war and everything, how tougher you can get after you. survive war. Nurkich sees that deeply ingrained toughness is one of the driving reasons behind his own rise to the NBA. I don't think people

understand that you've been through a lot and, you know, coming here at the highest, you know, level, at the highest stage is just make it simple, make it easier your life. You have your rights and all the reasons to believe in yourself and that if you don't want to believe, no I'm going to believe.

Nirkich was born in 1992. Just five months after the Bosnian began. One of his teammates on the Bosnian national team, Emir Soleimanovich, was born in the forest after his parents fled the city of Srebrenica, the site of a massacre that the United Nations would ultimately declare a genocide. It was like end of the world. And then your parents, everybody has the life on the whole country, and they even took away. So by the time, the United States and, you know, have a peace agreement, whatever, you know, you lose 10 years of life.

And then not just you lose 10 years of life, your parents, and everybody's throwing over. Yeah, there's no money. There are a lot of things, bombs and so many kill people. It was not right. So I think that's, that's make you tougher. They keep, you know, grenade and, you know, bombing. Imagine how that feels.

You know, being three years and once they're locked up with no food, no, you know, power or no anything. I think after you survived those and with the lose moment, I think nothing else can't surprise you really much. One morning in Sarajevo, I meet a historian and tour guide named Ahmed. And within seconds of introducing himself, he starts telling me a story from the war

about one of his friends who was playing soccer while snipers shot bullets over their heads. The game stopped and they debated whether to quit before deciding ultimately that it was worth the risk to keep playing, never mind the gunfire. Ahmed drives me around Sarajevo and gives me a history lesson on the city and the broader region while showing me the impacts of the war. He takes me to a graveyard where snipers set up and shot civilians,

and he shows me places where you can still see small craters from long ago bombs. For nearly four years, Sarajevo was under siege, surrounded on all sides by Bosnian Serb forces. He remembers his family had a bicycle generator that could power electrical devices as long as someone was turning the wheel. We will turn bicycle and we will power the wheels like someone will turn it on and we'll have something like for radio or sometimes even for television. So I remember first Michael Jordan game for the Bulls in my first Champions League game that I can remember that I watch was in the basement. Watching like that. It was the bicycle generator.

It was the first. Did you ride the bicycle or did someone else? No, no, no, no, no, you will turn it. You know, how can I describe it? So, wheels were like opposite side, you know, and you will just, you know, power it like this. You know, so it will produce electricity with your hands. And people were changing, you know, in the time I was a kid. But people were changing, you know, doing that, you know, sometimes for TV or for radio.

That's how Ahmed remembers watching the 1993 NBA finals. Michael Jordan's bowls against Charles Barkley's sons, sitting in a dark room, taking turns with friends and family turning the crank. The bombings, the food shortages, the economic destruction of war, it stretched across the region. In Belgrade, I talked with several people

who shared vivid memories of hiding and shelters and listening to bombs dropped by NATO forces all across the city. The wars of the 90s are this region's most recent mass trauma, but it's a region with a long, history of conflict. In Sarajevo, you can stand in the spot where Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, which was the first shot fired in World War I. People here lived for centuries under empire and occupation. I had one casual conversation off mic, in which I asked someone about basketball in the region, and within a matter of minutes,

he was telling me about a battle that was fought in 1389. It breeds a certain kind of mentality. You can call it toughness or you can call it resilience. But Bosnian journalist Harris Morkonia uses a different word for it. In Bosnia, we call it Inat. Inat is actually I don't know how to say it in English. I heard the exact same word back in Belgrade, right when I got off the plane and I met surgeon and his friends Victor and Alexandra. We have something called Enat, which is untranslatable. Don't distract.

No. No, you don't have translation in English. Milosh mentioned it too. You have probably heard of the words in Serbian which is Inat. This word can't be translated exactly, which means it can be translated in exactly in a million different ways. It's kind of just a general sense of fuck you. After first hearing about Inat, I came to love listening to the different ways people around the region define it. region defining. The word is untranslatable, but it means basically something like, I'm going to do it

out of spite. I'm not going to do it for my better judgment. I'm going to do it against my better judgment because you have failed to show necessary respect and belief in my good abilities. And I'm going to do it just to prove it to you. Here's how Boyan Bogdanovich, a Croatian, defines it. I mean, that's just the cruel people wrong. Like we are kind of a little bit stubborn from there, from Balkan, like all of us. So we are always trying to prove something to sound like. But yeah, Inat is kind of part of how we live and how we respond. Then something bad is happening to us.

And here's Bogdan from Serbia. That word, Enat, it means like you can break us. You know, like basically what it means. Like whatever you do, whatever you try, I'll try higher. I think, again, it starts with our history, you know, and how we are raising, you know, and how we kept our culture over the years. Different countries, same words, same mentality. And Nurkitsch says Bosnians define it almost the exact same way.

Again, he brings it back to his people's struggles during the war. We didn't have weapons, we didn't have an army like that. And we still survive and have, you know, save the country. And I think that's the qualification of, you know, Enat, which is like, you only have what you got, man. That's your home. If you don't want to fight for that, you're done. Basically, you're gone. So in this part of the world, you have height.

You have a long history of government investment in team sports. You have a long tradition of excellent coaching, including an emphasis on positionless basketball. But underneath all of that, you have something much older, much more enduring. Enut. I'm going to do it no matter what. Bogdan again. I'm going to have my workout no matter what, no matter how tired I'm from school, if my parents have money or don't have money, I'm going to find a way,

again, you know, to play basketball just to go outside and play and enjoy and, you know, that type of thing. So we are great in finding the ways to make it work. Back in Sarajevo, I asked Harris Morkonia, the Bosnian, journalist, how he sees this show up on the court when he's watching Nurkitch or other Bosnian players. You know when Yusuf Nurkich gets into with someone on the court in the NBA? And he like looks him in the eyes and smiles. That's a Bosnian, that's a Bosnian trait.

That's something that's as Bosnian as it can get. Because if you want to get physical, with me, I'm going to look nice, but with the look I'm going to kill you. And I'm going to kill you next time I get in the low block, I'm going to kill you. And the next time that you get on offense, I'm going to kill you with my defense. And I'm going to challenge you and I'm going to smile at you just because I can. And because I'm strong as a bear and you can do anything. In Belgrade, Milosh gave a similar explanation when talking about what defines Serbian players.

Most of the stories coming from this region are people making it against the odds. If they're playing team sports, you're going to hear a lot of those, you know, hard-scrabble stories, something like, you're going to hear stories. No, not so much. But if you rewind a couple of generations, you're going to hear stories about people traveling, commuting to their practice for like three hours, then going back, school, studies. all that stuff. Then there was wars, then there was food shortages, electricity, running water, whatever, whatever, whatever.

For that Dino Raja of Lade Divots, Tony Kukot's generation of basketball players, so much of this conflict was happening while they were thousands of miles away, playing in the NBA. But back in the Balkans, the wars through the regional clubs into complete chaos. One NBA scout, who didn't want me to use his name, told me that during and immediately after the wars, most of the basketball players and coaches who could do so got the hell out of the Balkans.

They went to other parts of Europe, mostly. Some coaches even went to the U.S. to work on college coaching staffs. That left a vacuum of sorts in the Balkans. Surely, plenty of those kids who grew up here in the 90s had basketball talent, but no one was around to nurture it. If you look at the drafts of the late 90s and early 90s in early 2000s, you won't find many success stories. There's Pajas Stoyakovich, who's Serbian.

He was drafted in 1996 and became an all-star with the Kings. But after Pesia, not much. Over the next 12 years, the highest profile player to be drafted from the Balkans was probably Darko Milichichich. The Serbian is famous for going second overall in the 2003 draft, right after LeBron James, and right before Carmelo Anthony, Chris Bosch, and Dwayne weighed, and then not amounting to much. But even though he became a famous bust, Darko's selection, still the highest ever for

a Balkan player, showed the NBA teams were now scouring the globe for talent. In 2008, Goren Droghich from Slovenia, in 2011 Nikola Vucovich from Montenegro by way of USC. In 2014, Dario Sarj from Croatia, Yusuf Nurkich from Bosnia, and Nikola Yokic, famously drafted in the middle of a Taco Bell commercial on the broadcast from Serbia. Luca Donchich came a few years later in 2018. But as much as it helped that NBA teams were now looking for players anywhere they could find them, the NBA scale also thinks there was simply more talent to be found in the Balkans after the wars.

During and immediately after the wars, top Balkan players left to play in other leagues around the world. So a couple things happened. One, younger players stepped into roles at clubs once occupied by veterans, speeding up their development. And two, coaches started returning to the region, putting back in place the same kind of infrastructure that had produced the golden generation before the wars. And that's how you get four all-stars from the same war-torned part of the world, all drafted within a decade of each other. The last stop of my trip is Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia. Luca is from here, but he moved to Spain when he was 13 years old,

so he could join the youth club at Real Madrid, which is the most decorated professional basketball team in the world outside the NBA. Wow, I saw him the first time when he was 13, and his father told me that he's going to play for Real Madrid, and I was like, wow, you know, this kid is really something, you know. This is Sani Bechirovich, the sporting director at Sedevito, Olympia. Sani was drafted by the Denver Nuggets, but never played in the NBA. He did score 18 points in a game against LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Carmelo Anthony, and Team USA at the 2006

World Championships in Japan. Now he's responsible for finding and developing talent for the biggest basketball club in his country. It's important to remember. Slovenia is small. You know, only two million of us. But the national team went on a Cinderella run to when Eurobasket in 2017, the year before Luca came to the NBA. The Luca Donchich effect and Goran Dragich effect happened and, you know, we became European champions and that only gave us even more national pride and identity. Luca was only 17 years old, but anyone who watched him during the tournament could see that he belonged on the big stage.

Igor Krakoskov was the coach then, and he says that his own decision to rely on Luca comes from the Yugoslavian basketball tradition of giving young players a chance to prove themselves at the highest level. One of the reasons why, you know, are young players developing so fast and so well because, you know, courage that our coaches had to play young guys at earlier age.

Like Dr.in Petroche, Tony, Cuccoch, Vlad, you can name it. Even Luca, they became professional where's at the age of 15, 16. Because once when you recognize if somebody is special, they have a unique talent for these sports,

they would have a courage to play those young guys even in front of the older guys. On the day I arrive in Ljubljana, Slovenia's national team is playing against Poland in the quarterfinals of Eurobasket. That night, I wander around the city center until I find an outdoor cafe on the main square,

showing the game on several TVs. Culturally, Slovenia is different from the rest of the region. For one, there's not the same depth of recent trauma. Again, their War of Independence lasted 10 days, much shorter than the other conflicts in the region. But it's more than that. People talk about Slovenians having a more Germanic influence in their culture and temperament. At the cafe, I see a group of young men who are particularly engaged in watching the game. Excuse me, guys.

I'm a journalist from America. I'm working on a story about basketball and the Balkans. Would you guys be cool? Is it okay if I talk to it? Okay, cool, cool. I introduce myself and we start talking. One of the five best players in the world, Lukudanjic, is from Slovenia.

Three, okay, fine. Any ideas as to what it is about the way the game is taught here or about the culture in this part of the world? that leads to so many great players coming from here? That's easy. It's in the water. No, I'm kidding. But I think in poorer countries, I think in general,

I think like the Balkans are stereotypically poorer. The sport is like some kind of like an escape from the world. And I think that's why the kids start playing sports from the young age and that's why they become good, I guess, maybe. And they're also very tall, I guess, I don't know. I don't know. Quick aside. Luca's father is ethnic Serbian.

When I was in Serbia, some people told me that I should ask Slovenians, whether they think he's Slovenian or Serbian. Because there are Serbs who definitely claim Luca. I brought this up. Slovenian, Slovenian, 100%. He may have Serbian roots, but he's Slovenian. I mean, just look at it. He's proud to play for Slovenia.

There's no question in his mind that he's Slovenian. And there's no question in our mind, he's Slovenian. It matters where he was raised, not where his parents were. It's funny because for us Slovenians, they say we have this northern German punctuality to us and it's Balkan kindness to us and it's, you know, relax and so on. So, yeah, I would say Luca has to make sure, like the best mixture of both. So it is quite accurate. On this night, though, things do not go well for Luca or for Slovenia.

They go down by 19 points at halftime, and despite a furious second-half comeback, fall short. They lose 90 to 87 to a Poland team that doesn't have a single NBA player, and Luca watches the final seconds from the bench after fouling out. Honestly, that's a theme of the trip. I planned my time in the Balkans to correspond with Eurobasket, thinking I might watch one of these countries receive their gold medals while at a bar in Belgrade or Zagreb or Ljubljana. surrounded by ecstatic fans. But it doesn't go that way.

Bosnia and Herzegovina doesn't even get out of its group. Montenegro and Croatia both lose in the round of 16. Even Serbia, with a healthy Nikola Yokic, one of the favorites to win the whole thing, gets upset by an Italy team playing without Danilo Golanari. Before it's lost to Poland, Slovenia had been the last Balkan team standing. The Eurobasket medalists are all from Western Europe.

Germany gets bronze, France, silver, and Spain the gold. All over the Balkans, I found people thrilled to talk about the greatness of their basketball culture. But a few people actually expressed reasons for concern. Before the breakup of Yugoslavia, the clubs here refused to follow the rest of Europe and import players from America. That's changed. And Igor Kukoshkov doesn't think it's a good thing. After the war, you know, the market was open and we started bringing international players. Now American players fill rosters of clubs all over the region.

Red Star Belgrade, one of the biggest powerhouses of the former Yugoslavian countries, has four. So does Belgrade's other powerhouse, partisan, who also has Australian former lottery pick Dante Exum. Igor worries that bringing in foreign players means fewer developmental opportunities for young players who grew up in these countries. And it's not only that. Sani Becherovich, the sporting director at Sedevita, said that young Slovenians are now trying to follow the Luca model by moving to Western Europe at a young age, often before they're ready. And the truth is, while this region has a rich basketball history

and a long track record of producing talent, my editors sent me here largely because the region happens to have produced two specific players. Yokic and their diamonds. who knows how many decades going to pass by before we find that caliber of players. I think it's just a unique moment in the history of the basketball that we have two guys coming from that reason. Talent can emerge from anywhere. Think about a few of the best players in the world. LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Jason Tatum, and many others came through the American system of high school, AAU, and college ball.

Janice Anadacompo and Joelle Embedde were discovered in faraway conference. after they picked up basketball relatively late. But there does seem to be something about this region, whether it's the quality of coaching, the deeply ingrained sense of Inut, or just the fact that, again, people here are really fucking tall. I definitely know that there's an incredible love for the game everywhere you go. And more than that, there's a love for the way the game has bound people here together, even during the most painful moments of their lives, even during war.

In Sarajevo, Samir Abditch showed me a text thread on the messaging app Fiber that he has going with every single player and coach from that 1987-under-19 Yugoslavia national team. It's been 35 years since they beat the Americans in that tournament. Their countries were split from each other by war. But still, today, Avditch calls them his brothers. This is a value that you cannot imagine. and sometime with this, you never be alone. In 2020, during the NBA playoffs in the bubble, players from across the league were all living in the same complex,

and a group of Balkan players started having meals together. Yokic, Donchich, Nurkich, Vucovichevich, Dharajovych, Boban Marjanovich, Ivitsuzubats, and others. The Athletic did a great story on this, explaining how they started with dinner and started singing Balkan folk songs. Dragich said they, quote, transformed the restaurant into a club.

In my own conversations with some of these guys, they pointed to the sense of shared identity. Here's Nurkich. You know, we're younger generations, and we was not with the guns or, you know, on a field and try to defend, you know, the country and whatever. So it's basically one land.

You should enjoy and respect, no matter where you're from. And that's what we try to show people. Like, we are regular people every day living, same life. And we respect each other and love each other and happy for their success. And that's what people appreciate it, I think. There is still, today, plenty of political and cultural tension in the Balkans.

Nationalism is on the rise, just as it is anywhere else. During my time there, I heard plenty of offhand comments disparaging members of other ethnic groups. The NBA guys, however, go out of their way to point out what they have in common. I feel connected to them. This is Zubats. We all speak the same language. We come from similar backgrounds. Those guys understand you better than guys from the States.

And it's just I love that we have so many guys in the league. You know, almost every night, there's someone from back home you're playing. And it's really great for the area back home. Boyon says it goes beyond just speaking the same language, listening to the same Balkan turbo-folk music, or craving a taste of Boric or Chavapi from back home. That's fight that we have in us and the way that we succeed. And in this league, it was really tough, like I said,

because we are coming from small countries. we kind of started to play basketball outside. We didn't have even real arenas or real gyms to play. So we have a lot of, a lot in-comas. And so that's why we are kind of connected. It wasn't always this collegial. In Belgrade, after we'd spent a long time talking about the wars and about the long-simmering tensions that linger to this day,

Milosh explained that the connection between the Balkan NBA players represent something larger, stitching people together in this part of the world. On the surface, we all dislike each other. I'm not going to say, hey, we dislike each other. Then after a couple of drinks, situation falls flat on its ass. And that's the weird reality of the Balkans,

which is, I think, after a couple of drinks, we're all going to forget where we came from. You know, a certain melody, a certain lyric is going to hit us. straight into the heart, as we say, and then you're going to forget for the rest of the meaning who's who and who went to what war. So, yeah. Even though the current generation of Balkan players

grew up in independent countries and the fractured remains of Yugoslavia, they all come from the same lineage of great players and coaches. They still carry that same sense of Enat. And that, more than anything, is what people emphasized to me during my time in the Balkans. that this boom of Balkan talent did not emerge from nowhere, that it's rooted in a history on and off the court,

that made careers like Yokic's and Donchich's and so many others possible. You're coming here, you're giving respect to the great basketball tradition which exists in the region, and you're learning that he's just the latest offshoot of ages, worth of tradition, subtext, rivalries, practices, feelings, wars, social economic occurrences and so on and so on and so on.

So those players, the great players from this region, didn't just happen because, you know, the kid was stolen and they shoved the basketball in his hands. They learned from the forefathers. There's tradition. You can smell it almost. If you're being poetic about it, you can say you can smell it almost. For that same reason, I'm pretty sure

in 30 years time, some other Jordan is going to be speaking with some other militia here on the bench, and we're going to be talking about the next great player, and the guys are going to be saying the same stuff. So, it runs deep. That's all I want to say. The story was reported and written by me, Jordan Ritter-Con. The executive producer of this audio feature is Mallory Rubin. Story editing by Justin Verrier. produced by Bobby Wagner and Vikram Patel. Fact-checking by Kellyn B-Coats.

Copy editing by Jack McCluskey. The music you heard in this story is from Blue Dot Sessions and Epidemic Sound. Sound design by Bobby Wagner. Special thanks to Molina Georgievich, Tine Ruzich, Ognijin Stoyakovich, and Yvon Todorovich.