Let me start with a story.
NBA front offices are nothing if not paranoid, so a funny thing happened in the lead-up to the 2018 NBA Draft. At the time, Slovenian prodigy Luka Doncic was starring for Real Madrid and all but certain to be a top-five pick, but teams were still sleuthing around Europe trying to collect additional background.
And who would know European prospects better than Kings general manager Vlade Divac? Especially with a front office that included fellow Serbs Peja Stojakovic and Peja Drobnjak. Their front office had connections (and spoke languages) that most of the rest of us didn’t.
So it caught everyone’s attention when the Kings seemed weirdly cold on selecting Doncic. This franchise had fallen over itself to put other Balkan players on the roster, trading a lottery pick for Bogdan Bogdanovic and Georgios Papagiannis, signing Nemanja Bjelica out of Philly at the last minute and even weirdly inking little-known Duje…
