Jokic: Horse Rider to MVP

A story about how Nikola Jokic, currently the NBA's best player, went from being an overweight horse-riding enthusiast in Serbia to becoming an NBA superstar.

"This guy was born in the middle of nowhere Serbia. He's got two older brothers, and even though they're really tall, he only likes one sport - horseback riding. He falls in love with horses and is always on the horse track.

Because he's so tall, he starts playing basketball. Nobody would have known about him except for one team that had a business model of finding prospects with NBA potential. They didn't care about winning now - they were like house flippers, trying to polish up assets and flip them to bigger teams.

The guy reads in the newspaper that at some youth basketball game, this kid had like 25 points and 25 rebounds. He finds Jokic and says, 'Hey, you ever thought about playing pro basketball?' Jokic says no, and at around age 13, he leaves his hometown to join this team.

But the coach wouldn't even play him because he was so out of shape. He was only allowed to practice, and they discovered he was drinking two gallons of Coke a day. They made him stop drinking Coke, and he loses like 30-40 pounds in a few months just by changing that one habit and running every day in practice.

He finally starts playing and becomes the top player on his team. He gets drafted in the second round of the NBA draft - they didn't even show him getting drafted, they just cut to a Taco Bell commercial and his name scrolled across the bottom ticker.

He almost didn't make it to the NBA - Barcelona was going to buy him, but the day before he was supposed to sign, he played so terribly that the team backed out. So he had no choice but to go to the NBA, and now he's become the best player in the world."