In 2018:
"He’s a beautiful player who plays a mental game. He has what seems to have been lost in the world, which is peripheral vision. When you walk down the street in life, when you drive a car in life, when you ride a bike in the world on a street, it is staggering the lack of peripheral vision. But Nikola Jokic is the antidote to so many of our problems in the world.”
• “When you see someone like a Nelson Mandela or a Martin Luther King or a Mahatma Gandhi, someone who sees the future before anyone else does, knows how to get to where they need to be, where they want to be, that is Nikola Jokic. Happiness begins when selfishness ends. In a game that has been taken over by incessant dribbling for yourself, Nikola Jokic is such a breath of fresh air. And it’s his imagination. Watching him play basketball is like watching Bob Dylan come up with a song.”
He epitomizes Coach Wooden’s most oft-repeated mantra to us, which was, ‘Basketball, like life, is not a game of size and strength. It’s a game of skill and timing and positioning. It’s not how big you are, it’s how big you play. It’s not how high you jump, it’s where you are and when you jump.’ Nikola’s a complete package of skill, timing and positioning, but even more importantly, he has so many elements of Steve Nash in his game. With Steve, there’s never been a player in my life who has elicited more awe and elicited more inspiration in terms of, ‘Oh my gosh, did you just see that?’ Nikola has a lot of that in him.”
• “When you watch Nikola Jokic play, you feel good about life. You feel good about the world. You believe that tomorrow is worth fighting for.”
From Dan Issel to Bill Walton to Dikembe Mutombo to Charles Barkley, the list of former NBA greats who love to watch Nikola Jokic play basketball keeps growing.
www.nytimes.com