By Michael KnappMarch 31, 2025

• Sports
• Biography & Autobiography

Why So Serious? The Untold Story of NBA Champion Nikola Jokic by Mike Singer. Harper, 2024. 368 pages.

DENVER NUGGETS CENTER Nikola Jokić is just shy of seven feet tall and his weight fluctuates in the vicinity of 300 pounds; he has the amorphous build of a middle school bully. His arms are perpetually decorated with scratches, his pale face invariably turns pink by halftime, and his vertical leap is more typical of a CPA. Nothing about Nikola Jokić screams superstar—not his disheveled appearance, not his wobbly running gait, and not even his height. In the NBA, a league of giants, Jokić is seldom the biggest player on the floor.

Underestimated through his first few seasons—due in part to his physical profile, and in part to stereotypes surrounding the “softness” of the NBA’s European contingent—Jokić has come to upend basketball conventions with a wholly unconventional game. Because while he can’t elevate above the defense, he can sink awkward hook shots from impractical angles with a Charmin-soft touch. And while he can’t scoot past his more agile opponents, he can fire passes around and through them with laser precision thanks to preternatural court vision. Jokić has leveraged his protean, unprecedented skill set into an NBA championship, two Olympic medals, and three of the league’s last four MVP awards.

Despite this sustained dominance, we have yet to find words sufficient for explaining Jokić’s genius, or for comprehending his rapid ascension from draft-night afterthought (he was selected in the second round during a Taco Bell commercial) to, in most estimations, the best player in the world. Attempts to demystify his wizardry have been further thwarted by his reclusive nature. He retreats to his beloved horse stables in his hometown of Sombor, Serbia, the second the season ends, and he has granted precious little access to journalists over the course of his decade-long career. When he is interviewed, he’s a prickly, evasive subject, making performance art out of sarcasm and self-effacement. All this to say, I was excited for former Nuggets beat writer Mike Singer’s new book, Why So Serious? The Untold Story of NBA Champion Nikola Jokic. As his book is sure to be the first of many “definitive” biographies written on this subject, I was interested to see if Singer, a seasoned NBA reporter with a facility for incisive analysis, could lend some clarity to Jokić’s hazy legend.

As far as athlete biographies go, Why So Serious? is standard fare. Like Bob Ryan covering Larry Bird and the Celtics for The Boston Globe in the 1980s, or Sam Smith working on the Chicago Tribune’s Bulls beat during the Jordan years, Mike Singer landed at The Denver Post just in time to cover a championship team with a generational talent. Why So Serious? primarily traces his subject’s improbable rise from dubiously talented Sombor teen to finals MVP, but it also serves as a retrospective on the various players, coaches, and executives that coalesced around Jokić in the run-up to the Nuggets’ 2023 championship, including streaky point guard Jamal Murray, visionary general manager Tim Connelly, and fiery head coach Mike Malone.

Thanks in large part to its bingeable construction—told as it is in 95 linear, rapid-fire chapters—Why So Serious? is an exceedingly digestible biography. It’s filled with amusing recollections and hyper-tweetable tidbits: for example, a 20-year-old Jokić, newly arrived to the States, failing to grasp team-bonding activities such as capture the flag: “[H]e paraded on the wrong side of the line, [his own team’s] flag proudly in hand.” (“Somebody lit his ass up,” said former teammate Gary Harris.) Singer also regularly flaunts his basketball expertise, making advanced metrics accessible in unraveling Jokić’s uniquely unselfish dominance:

Nikola far and away led the NBA with 100 touches per game. But unlike the other ball-dominant players, which almost exclusively meant point guards, Jokic’s decisions were rarely prolonged. He averaged just 2.6 seconds per touch […] The league leaders in [touches per game] like Luka Doncic, Trae Young, and James Harden, all hovered at more than six seconds per touch. Jokic’s processing was unparalleled.

There’s plenty of similarly superb analysis, but it doesn’t keep Singer’s biography from occasionally drifting over into hagiography, as he approaches Jokić less as a journalistic subject than as an infallible icon. While Singer isn’t exactly friends with Nikola—he writes of having a “working relationship” with the Jokić family—the occasional turns to first-person do reveal a personal stake in his subject. This dynamic is encapsulated by Jokić’s elusiveness upon catching wind of Singer’s impending trip to Serbia (presumably to work on his book): “I’ll tell you where I am,” Jokić says, “but you will not find me.”

Much of Singer’s adoration is understandable. Jokić comes off as a genuinely solid guy living a modest life, at least by multi-hundred-millionaire standards. And while the stories of his disdain for nutrition and conditioning have taken on mythological status—upon entering the league he couldn’t hold a forearm plank for 20 seconds and drank a gallon of soda every day—Jokić is, somewhat begrudgingly, committed to his craft, as his strength coach talked him into lifting after every game so they could “load” him more without the soreness impacting his play.

Jokić’s work ethic—not to mention humility—seems to be a by-product of his eldest brother’s experience in the States. Nemanja was far from the standout his younger brother is, but while playing for the University of Detroit Mercy, he lived with Darko Miličić, a close friend and fellow Serbian whom the Detroit Pistons infamously drafted with the second overall pick in 2003 (only one spot below LeBron James and one ahead of Carmelo Anthony, who would be taken by the Nuggets). Miličić went on to become one of the biggest busts in NBA history, and the eldest Jokić learned the “blueprint for what not to do” as a professional from Miličić’s self-sabotage, witnessing “how quickly things could deteriorate when basketball wasn’t the priority.”

Nemanja Jokić’s experience with Miličić instilled in his brother a palpable distaste for celebrity. With a few exceptions, the younger Jokić prefers the company of the less heralded members of the Nuggets organization. His closest confidant on the team is probably strength and conditioning coach Felipe Eichenberger, and he’s also friend to longtime equipment manager Sparky Gonzales, who puts on “a backyard barbecue for the team’s ballboys” every year. When Jokić learned of it, “he decided to show up, unannounced.” (“He ate all the goddamn wings,” Gonzales complained.)

Endearing anecdotes abound; there’s a boyish quality to Jokić and most everyone in his orbit speaks of him glowingly. The few cited faults usually, inevitably, have to do with his heavily scrutinized physique. The body positivity movement has yet to make it to the NBA, and I’m fascinated by how brazenly frames and figures are discussed in the sports world. Jokić’s seesawing weight has been a concern throughout his career. This is due in part to what it purportedly communicates about his dedication to the game, but it also speaks to more valid concerns surrounding his susceptibility to injury. Heavier players like Zion Williamson and Joel Embiid have struggled to stay on the floor this season, and despite his unfathomable talent, the stocky Luka Dončić was recently traded to the Lakers; the Mavericks front office cited injury concerns stemming from his weight as part of the impetus for the deal. In Why So Serious? Singer details a particularly striking episode where an assistant coach ridiculed a tearful, adolescent Jokić for having boobs. The assistant was promptly fired. He “crossed a line” that, apparently, the myriad publicly available recruiting profiles of teenage prospects are not crossing, despite using similarly critical language.

Singer condemns the assistant coach’s actions, calling them “despicable,” but he also concedes that, at times, “Nikola’s frame did limit him on the court.” The focus on Jokić’s later-career adaptation of a stricter conditioning regimen suggests that Singer considers many of these concerns a thing of the past. Still, Nikola does occasionally enter training camp out of shape (like many NBA players), such as in 2019 when he was, per Nuggets executive Artūras Karnišovas, well over 300 pounds. “I’ve never seen him that heavy,” Karnišovas said. Occasional preseason issues excepted, I’d personally go so far as saying that Jokić is one of the better conditioned bigs in the league. He’s top ten in the NBA in minutes played, and I routinely see him beat opposing centers down the floor, getting a couple baskets every game off hustle alone.

Questions about his body aside, Jokić is portrayed in a relentlessly flattering light. There’s a rose-colored tint to Singer’s authorial lens, and I occasionally wondered if Singer fell under Jokić’s spell, as having a front-row seat to such unparalleled dominance has to be awe-inspiring. (I’m similarly enthralled by Jokić while streaming League Pass on my laptop.) Singer swiftly does away with tension—a mid-season feud between Jokić and head coach Mike Malone is mollified in a couple pages—and there’s a fairy-tale quality to his sketches of Jokić’s relationships. We’re repeatedly reminded that conversations with teammates, such as with journeyman point guard Jameer Nelson, are “about life, not necessarily basketball.” With coaches such as Wes Unseld Jr. or Ogi Stojaković, discussions are approached “from an intellectual standpoint” and often stray away from the hardwood to “books, or politics, or ‘normal’ things.” To tell us they were talking about “life” or “politics” or “normal things” is to tell us they could have been talking about anything. (Just don’t accuse them of talking about basketball.)

As a basketball fan myself, I wish Singer had explored the rumblings of discontent emanating from Denver. The tension seems to primarily revolve around the Nuggets’ inability to maintain a stable, talented core around Jokić. Despite their 2023 title, he has never played with a current all-star. Denver has let key pieces walk in free agency—Kentavious Caldwell-Pope, Bruce Brown, and Jerami Grant, to name a few—and the team has often prioritized acquiring young talent through the draft. That is, instead of signing established veterans to lucrative contracts, the Nuggets have taken inexpensive flyers on unproven rookies. While this approach looks to be paying off with Most Improved Player candidate Christian Braun, former first round picks Julian Strawther, Zeke Nnaji, and Peyton Watson barely cracked last year’s playoff rotation. (To be fair, the Nuggets have doled out sizable deals to Aaron Gordon, Jamal Murray, and Michael Porter Jr., and the league’s new second apron severely limits salary cap flexibility.)

Jokić might be too low-maintenance to concern himself with any of this; maybe it’s just fodder for NBA Reddit threads. But I was hoping to dig deeper on some more salient issues, such as the conduct of Jokić’s two elder brothers. Their high jinks have become folklore among basketball fans, and there are certainly some hilarious (though terrifying) stories in Singer’s book. Jokić relays one story from his adolescence where Strahinja, the middle brother, “stood on [his] arms and […] threw knives right around [his] head.” This roughhousing has continued into adulthood; Nikola would routinely come to practice with bruises, and Strahinja had a strange way of telling Nuggets general manager Tim Connelly that the team’s fitness routine was working: “The other day we were wrestling, and [Nikola’s] thighs felt very strong.”

The brotherly mischief is almost exclusively played for laughs, but make no mistake, there is a darker side to their conduct—Strahinja’s in particular, as he was arrested for domestic violence in 2019, and was charged more recently with assault for punching a fan during a playoff game. Nikola Jokić is, assuredly, not Strahinja, but he has had some notoriously vicious fouls, such as a retaliatory shot that knocked Markieff Morris out for most of a season, and I’m curious about this tacit connection between violence and competition. “Jokić had a hair-trigger temper that could be unleashed if he felt tested,” writes Singer. It’s a rare foray into something like criticism that isn’t explored further.

I was also interested in Singer’s coverage of the NBA’s Balkan brotherhood, whose home countries—Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia—comprised Yugoslavia prior to its violent ethnic conflicts and subsequent collapse. Unlike most relationships rendered in Singer’s biography, Montenegrin All-Star Nikola Vučević says the NBA’s Balkan contingent “do[es]n’t ever talk about politics,” and despite their “countries’ recent turmoil […] they all shared the same language.” There’s a beauty to the way commonalities of origin transcend whatever ethnic and nationalist tensions might linger, but I was curious to hear more about how basketball “became a healthy distraction” and a “revered […] sanctuary” following the dissolution of Yugoslavia. They’re all too young to have experienced the wars firsthand, but their parents, and even siblings, were not.

Their Balkan backgrounds would serve as a fascinating lens on our own country’s simmering racial tension, which came to a head while these players were quarantined in the Disney World Bubble, where the NBA finished out its pandemic-abbreviated season shortly after George Floyd was murdered and the Black Lives Matter movement flooded city streets. While many of their teammates held forums on whether to suspend the season in a show of solidarity with the ongoing protests, Jokić and his fellow Balkans blew off steam with a raucous evening of drinking and dancing at a lakeside, ad hoc restaurant. “They were all foreigners, far from their families, and in need of camaraderie,” writes Singer. Surely, this is true, and not without its pathos, but I can’t help but think it’s missing the forest for the trees, substituting a complex problem—systemic racism, and what role the NBA, a predominantly Black league, should play in combating it—for a more straightforward one: homesickness.

To be clear, there is plenty of great stuff in Singer’s book. He has a knack for economical characterization, and, again, for making comprehensible the intricate nuances of the game. And then the childhood tales of Jokić’s fervent love for horses are hysterical, and oddly affecting: “I’m sorry, coach, but we are much better than these guys,” he told his youth coach in the middle of a blowout win, “I’m going to the horse race.”

I was also intrigued by the way Singer attempts to reconcile his subject’s exceptional gifts with his seeming ambivalence about said gifts: “Basketball is not main thing in my life and probably never gonna be,” says Jokić. Singer poses the pertinent questions in response: “How could his competitive spirit reconcile with that approach? And what if it was because of that balance that he achieved his success?” It brings to mind David Foster Wallace’s thoughts on how an athlete’s “blindness and dumbness” about his or her ability is not the price of the gift but, rather, the “essence” of it. The best players often make horrible coaches for exactly that reason: they can’t articulate their greatness and teach it to their players because their greatness is incomprehensible. They probably can’t understand their ability themselves, and becoming conscious of the exact physiology underlying their gifts would mean developing a crippling level of self-awareness that would cost them their talent.

I can’t help but think about this disconnect—between an elite athlete’s ability and his or her grasp on that ability—in relation to Jokić’s doughy frame. That is, I wonder if he’s succeeding not in spite of his body but, just maybe, because of it. I don’t mean this in the sense that his beer belly is an athletic advantage, but in the sense that his dad bod speaks to the healthy relationship he has to his own greatness. He’s no Adonis, but neither is Patrick Mahomes, nor Tyson Fury, nor plenty of other dominant contemporary athletes. Why So Serious? indeed.

LARB Contributor

Michael Knapp’s writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Cleveland Review of Books, Full Stop, and elsewhere.

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