The Draft Night No One Really Saw
If you blinked during the second round of the 2014 NBA Draft, you missed it. Actually, even if you were glued to the screen, you probably missed it too. The moment Nikola Jokic officially became a Denver Nugget happened in the most unglamorous way possible: while a Taco Bell commercial ran during the broadcast. No walk to the stage. No smile for the cameras. Just deputy commissioner Mark Tatum reading a name to a room that barely looked up, a scroll of text along the bottom of the screen, and a commercial that kept on selling as if the league hadn’t just stumbled into its most unlikely treasure. Years later, reporters would call it “famously announced during a Taco Bell commercial,” and the league itself would repost the old clip like a museum label under a masterpiece that almost went straight to storage.
The best part? Jokic was asleep when it happened. Back in Sombor, Serbia, the kid with soft hands and a wide grin dozed through his big break. The Nuggets stashed him overseas for another season at Mega Basket, where he kept polishing the weird, wonderful game that didn’t fit into neat scouting boxes. He wasn’t the fastest or the springiest. He didn’t jump off the screen—until the ball found him. That’s when everything lit up, angles opening like trap doors, passes sliding into pockets no one else saw, points coming from footwork and feel instead of brute force. It wasn’t flashy; it was inevitable. Then he came to Denver and made “inevitable” a nightly thing.
You can picture the scene that night in 2014 because it feels so ordinary. Somewhere, a fan’s phone buzzed—“Who is this Jokic guy?”—and then went quiet again. Somewhere else, a Nuggets scout allowed a small smile, the kind you try to hide when you think you’ve snuck a diamond past the rest of the room. And somewhere far away, in a town where the streets are wide and slow and the stables are full, a future MVP snored right through his own headline.
This is the part of the story that never gets old: the commercial break becomes a punch line, and the punch line becomes a prophecy. Years later, when people bring up the ad, it lands like a movie trailer to the main feature—because what came next turned the quietest draft moment into the loudest legacy.
From Afterthought to 3× MVP
There’s a special kind of electricity to the first time you realize a player is different. With Jokic, it felt like watching someone speak a language you understood but had never heard sung. He started bending games around his vision. He wouldn’t sprint; he’d float to a spot and wait for a teammate to cut, and then—snap—the ball would arrive an instant before the defender. One pass bleeds into another, a tip-in becomes a no-look, and the box score fills like a bathtub. You think, “That can’t scale.” Then it scales. You think, “That can’t last.” Then it lasts.
By 2021, the league stopped arguing and started applauding. Jokic won the Kia NBA Most Valuable Player award, and it wasn’t just a feel-good story—it was history. He became the lowest-drafted player to be named MVP, a 41st overall pick who turned “second-rounder” into a badge of honor. The next year, he did it again, going back-to-back in 2022. The debate shows had to find new topics. The rest of us learned to stop being shocked and just enjoy the ride.
Then came Denver’s first NBA championship in 2023, with Jokic taking home the Bill Russell Finals MVP after a series that felt like a thesis defense on how to control a game without breaking a sweat. Not with heat-check threes or chasedown blocks, but with constant, controlled brilliance—angles, touches, rebounds that turned into outlets that turned into layups. Watching him hold the trophy was surreal: the sleepy second-rounder from Sombor, the guy who once got drafted under a fast-food jingle, now standing at the center of a confetti storm. The box scores looked like video game sliders gone wrong: points, rebounds, assists, all stacked and sensible. He didn’t need to tell us how he felt. The work said it for him.
And still, the story kept growing. In 2024, he picked up his third MVP, the kind of number you only share with the greats. Three MVPs aren’t an accident. They’re a pattern you can’t ignore, a confirmation that the way he plays isn’t just unique—it’s dominant. He joined the short list of players with three or more, and the way he got there said as much as the plaque does: calm, repeatable excellence that makes teammates better and possessions feel like puzzles he solves in real time.
You can chase reasons for why it works. Some will say it’s his mind, the way he processes the floor like a chessboard. Others point to touch, the softest hands in the league, shots that bounce on the rim like they’re deciding whether to obey him. There’s the strength you don’t notice until a defender bounces off him and looks around for a whistle. And there’s the endurance, the simple truth that he shows up, again and again, ready to do boring brilliant things for 35 minutes a night. But maybe the best explanation is the simplest: he loves the game in the quiet way that breeds mastery. Practice looks like fun. Film looks like curiosity. The showy parts of fame never seemed to fit.
It helps to know where he’s from. Sombor is flat and easygoing, the kind of place where life doesn’t rush you, and Jokic never let the NBA rush him either. He’s the superstar who lights up talking about horses—his family’s stables, the harness races, the rhythm of a life that makes him feel normal when the rest of his world is anything but. After the title, he went home to celebrate, to breathe, to be the kid from Sombor again. That balance—basketball and everything beyond it—seems to power him. When you watch him beam beside a horse, you realize the same gentleness that shows up in his footwork shows up there, too. It’s all connected.
What makes the Taco Bell story so perfect isn’t just that it’s funny. It’s that it reveals how terrible we are at recognizing greatness in real time. The league didn’t plan a moment for Jokic. TV didn’t hold the broadcast. The algorithms didn’t spike. And still, truth found a way. The pick at No. 41, the stash season, the slow rise into a starting role, the first All-NBA nods, the deep playoff runs—they all blurred into a case you could no longer deny. He wasn’t a fluke. He was the blueprint for a different kind of star, one who builds advantages possession by possession and reshapes what we think a center can be without yelling about it.
So yeah, he’s a three-time MVP now. The commercial break has turned into a chapter heading, and the chapter is still being written. There’s a warmth to this story that I can’t shake. It’s in the way teammates talk about him, and the way opponents sigh when he whips a pass to the corner before the defender even knows he’s been baited. It’s in the grin he tries to hide when a baby hook flips off glass the way he intended. It’s in the city of Denver, which waited a long time for its parade and got one led by a man who would have been just as happy to be home the next day, checking on the horses.
If you’re a young hooper, there’s a lesson tucked inside all this. You don’t need to jump out of the gym to change the game. You need to see it clearly, to love it enough to solve the boring parts, to find joy in the passes that don’t make highlight reels but turn possessions into points. If you’re a scout, there’s a different lesson: check your biases at the door. Greatness doesn’t always fit the body type you’ve sketched in your head. Sometimes, the best player alive slips past in the second round, introduced to the world while a voiceover sells a late-night snack.
And if you’re just a fan, this story is a gift. It reminds us why we watch. Not just for the obvious stars and the loud moments, but for the beautiful surprises that sneak up on us. A decade ago, a commercial tried to borrow a minute of your attention. Today, that minute belongs to Nikola Jokic, and it always will.
He was drafted in near-silence. He answered with a career that’s anything but. That’s how a commercial break became a beginning, and how a sleepy kid from Sombor turned into a 3× MVP who made the whole league look again.