Serbia’s loss to Team USA biggest of my career

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — Nikola Stojkovic wasn’t about to let himself get elbowed out of the way. He’d waited too long, traveled too far.

He was posted up on the proverbial lower block, if Nikola Jokic was the basket. “I wanted to position myself well,” Stojkovic explained afterward. And he had succeeded. At the heart of an interview scrum months in the making, now was the moment of truth. Then he started feeling this nudge.

“I had one guy who was, I don’t know, holding his phone, his microphone, and he was like jabbing me with his elbow,” said Stojkovic, who reports for Mozzart Sport in Serbia. “I was like, ‘Man, what are you doing?’ And he was like, ‘Move, move.’ I stood here first. OK, I can maybe turn myself so you can get a little bit closer, but you don’t jab me like that.”

Stojkovic has height and muscle — maybe not Jokic-caliber, but enough to be a formidable power forward if all the journalists in the room were to commandeer it for a pickup game.

So, as if to honor the world-famous basketball player who shares his first name, Stojkovic found himself boxing out.

“Everything is about positioning,” he said, laughing.

During the wee hours of Thursday morning back in Denver, the scene at Abu Dhabi’s Etihad Arena resembled an NBA Finals media day: scores of tripods and cameras flocking across the court like a school of fish as Nuggets and Celtics players took their turns at the podium.

Except these are not season-defining games about to be played Friday and Sunday. They’re not even games that count for anything.

The annual NBA preseason event in the Middle East marks a rare occasion when the league is within reach of European and Asian media outlets. Reporters who make the trip can ask their own questions and collect their own content from superstar basketball players — a luxury their employers can’t usually afford. Needless to say, the professional stakes can feel high, even if they’re nonexistent for the athletes. It results in an amusing dichotomy. A media circus over something meaningless.

Now, factor in that Jokic didn’t grant a single interview all summer, not even in his own language. He led the Serbian national team to an Olympic bronze medal in silence.

How’s that for stakes?

“It was pretty much our biggest reason why we are here,” Stojkovic said.

He and a coworker were in Abu Dhabi in July, too. Team Serbia and other national teams were playing exhibitions to prepare for the Olympics in the same venue that will play host to the Nuggets and Celtics on Friday. It was a golden opportunity.

But Stojkovic couldn’t land a quote from his country’s best player (and maybe the world’s). Nobody could.

So they jumped on another flight and tried again.

“Abu Dhabi is pretty much close to Serbia,” he said, sounding like he was convincing himself. “It’s a five-hour plane ride, so it’s not that far.”