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 gam.