RIO DE JANEIRO – It was Nuggets center Nikola Jokic versus the Dream Team. It was no contest.
With NBA superstar Kevin Durant nailing long shots, slamming dunks and dropping jaws, the United States rolled to a 96-66 victory Sunday over Serbia in the championship game of the Olympic tournament.
Jokic got schooled. But the 21-year-old big man with a big future also got a silver medal for his trouble.
“Itap really cool. I don’t know how many people in the world have a silver medal. Maybe a thousand?” said Jokic, unable to take his eyes off the prize cradled in his left hand.
“This is a big thing for us. Itap a big thing for the whole nation. I don’t know, but I think all my friends are waiting for us to come back home. Serbia is now, like, crazy.”
So, after the party ends in Belgrade, will Jokic bring his medal to Colorado and show it off to teammates in the Nuggets locker room?
“Probably not,” Jokic told me.
Then he got serious, and the emotion in Jokic’s voice revealed how precious this silver really is to him. It’s too precious to share with anybody except loved ones. He won’t flaunt the medal. He will cherish it.
“This medal is going to be in my home, with my (Olympic) jersey. Itap going to be there for the whole of my life, ” Jokic said. “This medal is all for me and my family.”
The starters for Team USA opened the game as if they had ignored the alarm for their afternoon nap. Sleeping-walking through the majority of the first quarter, the Americans trailed 14-13 after missing their first six shots from three-point range and playing an ugly brand of isolation basketball that had netted them only one early assist.
It all changed to a flood of good red, white and blue vibrations, however, when Kyle Lowry dropped a dime off a drive and DeMarcus Cousins converted an old-fashioned three-point play to give the Americans a 16-14 lead. The heavy tourney favorites never looked back, ripping off a 39-15 run to end the first half and bury any crazy dreams of a Serbian upset.
“They are a Dream Team. They are superstars,” Jokic said. “Those players are the leaders on their NBA teams. They are good. If you stop one player, someone else is going to score. So you cannot stop all of them.”
But he is no longer intimidated by NBA stars he admired as a teenager.
“I play against them. I know them. They are just players,” Jokic told me earlier in the tournament. “I think my year in Denver helped me so much. I think I’m a much better player than the time of my first game with the Nuggets.”
In the absence of LeBron James, who stayed home after leading Cleveland to the NBA title, the Olympics belonged to Durant, who produced 30 points against Serbia and maybe 1,000 times as many ooh’s and ah’s from the star-struck crowd in the arena.
Earlier in the Games, during pool play, the ball movement of Serbia had given the U.S. defense fits, and Jokic scored 25 points and added six rebounds in a game the Americans were fortunate to win by three points. But in the final showdown, it was clear stopping Jokic was a point of emphasis by coach Mike Krzyzewski. The Denver rookie struggled to get his hands on the ball at the offensive end, where he was limited to six points, and was often bulldozed when trying to stay in front of Cousins on the defensive end.
“He plays with a lot of confidence for a young kid,” Cousins said, duly impressed by Jokic’s rapid development.
Since celebrating his 60th birthday in 2007, Coach K has won two NCAA championships at Duke, as well as leading the USA to gold at the Summer Games in Beijing, London and Rio de Janeiro. This time around, Krzyzewski won with a revamped roster, largely unproven on the international stage and missing numerous A-list NBA stars.
“It bothers me when some of our players, or any of them, are called B players or C players. That’s ludicrous. That’s an insult. They’re all great players, ” said Jerry Colangelo, the director of USA Basketball.
What does Jokic’s silver mean to the Nuggets?
“Experience playing at such a high level, against the world’s best, will mean so much as he enters next season,” Denver general manager Tim Connelly said. “We are so proud of Nikola and his teammates winning the silver. It made us really proud.”
And when’s the last time the Nuggets won anything, much less anything so cool as shiny Olympic bling?
Well, Kenneth Faried did win the World Cup with the U.S. national team in 2014.
In 2017, think there’s a chance Jokic and Faried could win an NBA playoff series together?
We can dream.
