While the NBA playoffs is still underway and teams like the Dallas Mavericks are focused on the Larry O’Brien trophy, the upcoming Olympics is slowly being discussed among basketball circles. The hype is high around Team USA as the final roster looks to be one of the most star-studded in recent memory.
While the roster points to a potential US gold, there’s one region in the world where the basketball talent could even rival Team USA if it were ever true. This area holds two of the most exciting players to have ever set foot on the NBA, and the idea of them teaming up would be terrifying.
Goran Dragic reveals Dallas Mavericks’ Luka Doncic and Denver Nuggets’ Nikola Jokic would have been teammates in Yugoslavia
Goran Dragic appeared on The OGs Show and talked about everything about basketball. They discussed his NBA and international career as well as the future of the sport.
However, one of the most interesting tidbits shared during the episode was the fact that Olympic basketball would have been a different landscape if Yugoslavia were still united.
Dragic explains that Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia were the countries that made up the country. It experienced tensions back in the late eighties to early nineties, and the country had split off to what it looks like today.
While the conflict surrounding the collapse of Yugoslavia is complicated, Dragic talked about the basketball heritage of the former country.
“Back in the day, imagine the national team. You had Drazen Petrovic, Dino Rada, Vlade Divac,” Dragic said.
He then floated the idea that players like Luka Doncic, Nikola Jokic, Nikola Vucevic, and Bogdan Bogdanovic would have been united under the Yugoslavian flag and gave the United States a hard time in any international tournament.
With the way both Luka and the Joker have been playing as of late, it may have been a good thing for the rest of the basketball world that Yugoslavia split up. One can only imagine the types of plays that would come out of having Doncic and Jokic on the same team.
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