Our antiquated ideas about what an elite athlete should be are evolving. And the league’s foreign stars are showing there is more than one way to win
“Basketball is not the main thing in my life. And probably never gonna be.”
Those are not the words you might expect to hear from the Denver Nuggets’ point-center Nikola Jokić: a bonafide superstar, two-time league MVP, who was, at the time of these comments, about to head into his (and his franchise’s) first ever NBA finals (where he would win, handily, for that matter). But Jokić is not the type of superstar we’ve come to expect in the NBA. He has something that has been rare, and even frowned upon, among athletes of his caliber: perspective. So, in a world where work/life balance is a hot button topic, and we’ve recently lived through a pandemic that flipped our lives upside down, why are his sentiments so polarizing? And are they a true anomaly, or a bellwether?
