Please Enjoy Nikola Jokic Starring In A Commercial With A Pony

Nikola Jokic is a two-time NBA MVP and one-time NBA champion, but despite holding a claim to being the best basketball player in the world, he is not someone who we see a lot in ad campaigns.

Jokic, rather famously, prefers to live mostly out of the spotlight, going back home to Serbia in the summers to watch his horses race and live it up in his home country. However, Jokic finally found a company to work with that aligns with his laid back lifestyle and is the star of a new Hotels.com campaign in which he takes his young Nuggets teammate Peyton Watson along for some vacation time to show him the finer points of travel.

Two of Jokic and Watson’s ads went live on Tuesday (via Katy Winge of Altitude TV) and they are truly delightful, with one featuring Jokic wandering through a hotel with Watson with a pony (while a piano plays “Pony” by Ginuwine in the background) and the other having Jokic explain the similarities between a hotel pool and an NBA arena to his young teammate.

Jokic feeding a pony out of his hand in a hotel lobby and lounging in a cabana by the pool is maybe the most realistic ad campaign featuring a star athlete in history. His dry humor also shines through (as does Watson’s) in the ads, and thankfully there is also a blooper reel that includes the pony trying to eat Jokic’s fingers, pooping while he holds onto the leash, and Jokic cursing himself out for forgetting his lines.

I don’t expect this will be the start of Jokic becoming the next Shaq or Peyton Manning and showing up in tons of ads, but there might not be a better ambassador in sports for a brand that’s about fining the right vacation.