With the Portland Trail Blazers in Los Angeles to take on the Clippers on Tuesday evening, Blazers center Jusuf Nurkic made an extended appearance (alongside Neil Everett) on ESPN’s SportsCenter. Nurkic, who is often an entertaining presence, would seem to be a natural fit for this kind of conversation and, in short, the 24-year-old didn’t disappoint.
The entire thing is absolutely worth a watch, as Nurkic and Everett are playing ping-pong and batting topics around in a fun way. Still, the headliner of the interview was the time Nurkic spent talking about Kobe Bryant (his childhood basketball idol), beginning near the four-minute mark. Later, he brought things back around near the eight-minute mark with another anecdote.
In short, Kobe’s famous trash talk didn’t just occur in English during his basketball career.
“A funny story was, he’s shooting the free throws, Kobe, and I’m out there like, ‘Nobody even can touch him, how is that possible,’ all night he was in free throws,” Nurkic said. “He actually says a word in my language and I was like, ‘I didn’t hear right, he can’t speak my language, right?’ So we go back and forth, and he goes again to free throws and he repeats that. It was curse word, but it’s like … I’m pretty sure he said that. Then I was, you know, after a couple years in the league, he was, like, preparing himself when he plays against some teams, he will try to learn a little bit about every player he’ll play.”
It would be fun to hear Bryant’s side of the trash talking story, particularly through the prism of whether he even remembers. Still, it would be incredibly on-brand for Bryant to have studied Bosnian simply to be able to prod Nurkic in his native tongue.
As you can hear in the interview, Nurkic went well beyond that singular story about Bryant’s trash talk and he certainly had positive memories of the future Hall of Fame guard. It is still perfect that things were able to come full circle, though, because everyone in the NBA seemingly has a Kobe Bryant story.
