By Eurohoops / info@eurohoops.net
Retired forward Sasa Pavlovic used something that Atlanta Hawks guard Bogdan Bogdanovic told him when he was having his first practices in the NBA as an example of the big difference in the speed of the game between NBA and European basketball.
Here’s what Pavlovic said in the first episode of the Jao Mile podcast, hosted by former NBA and Euro-Ball player Mile Ilic.
“I remember, for example, Bogdan’s [Bogdanovic] first season [2017] when he left. Bogdan, who was the best player in Europe at the time, won the Euroleague, took the title… He said: ‘Brother, I didn’t manage to shoot in practice. As I receive the ball, if I don’t look at the basket in the same second, there is a player, I can’t move’. I told him: ‘That’s it, if you have literally a hundredth of a second, you have to get the shot up.’
Bogdan is a great worker and believes in himself a lot, so he adjusted very quickly. But I want to tell you how shocking it is when you come from a high level of basketball, Bogdan from an even higher level than I did then. He thought that what he was doing in Europe was fast enough but he couldn’t even look at the basket in practice.”
Bogdanovo iskustvo sa prvog NBA treninga pic.twitter.com/FQHt6WcIt7
— Jaomile podcast (@mileilic) April 2, 2022
Pavlovic first moved to the NBA in 2003 for the Utah Jazz and then became a teammate of LeBron James on the Cleveland Cavaliers from 2004 to 2009. After some other NBA trips, he returned to Europe in 2014 and joined Bogdanovic on Partizan Belgrade. He last played with Panathinaikos in 2015-2016.
Bogdanovic was an emerging EuroLeague star then. In 2017, he was named to the All-First Team of the competition, shortly before winning the championship with Fenerbahce Beko. A few months afterward he made his own jump to the NBA by signing with the Sacramento Kings.