Malone shares Kerr’s message to Jokic after passing of Warriors assistant

The basketball world is in shock after Golden State Warriors assistant coach Dejan Milojevic had a sudden heart attack and died Wednesday morning at 46.

Milojevic joined the Warriors staff in 2021 and aided the team to the NBA title in 2022. Before that, he coached Mega Basket from 2012-2020, where he led Nikola Jokic for three seasons during the now two-time NBA MVP’s formative years

“I heard too much of, ‘No, Jokic, he can’t do it,'” Milojevic said in 2020 to ESPN. “They said, ‘Look at him.’ I did — and I saw someone special.”

As a player, Milojevic was a star for the Serbian national team during the 1990s and 2000s. At the club level, he won the Adriatic League MVP three times.

“A close friend of Nikola’s, (Nuggets assistant) Ognjen Stojakovic and the Serbian basketball community, he meant a lot to a lot of people,” Jokic’s current coach Michael Malone said to reporters on Thursday in Boston. “He left behind an amazing legacy, the lives he’s impacted. It’s tragic, he was at a young age. When we knew he was in the hospital I reached out to Steve Kerr, who was there with his family and he got right back to me. Steve left me a note when he passed and wanted me to know how much Dejan loved Nikola and how proud he was of him. That’s all I tried to share with Nikola. I just went through this with my father. Losing somebody you care about is hard. Dejan did love him and now it’s up to Nikola to carry on his legacy on and off the court. Make sure Dejan’s name continues to be talked about. We’re thinking about them, his family and the Warriors staff.”

Nikola would’ve last seen the Warriors and likely Milojevic about two weeks ago when he hit an incredible half-court buzzer-beater to steal a Nuggets win at Golden State. The game was the second part of a developing feud between Kerr and Jokic. But the tragedy impacting the hoops world seems to have quelled that for the moment.

Two photos I took of Dejan Milojević and Jokić at the Christmas Warriors game
byu/Nuggets365 indenvernuggets

Jokic was close enough with Milojevic that the case of COVID-19 he got in Serbia in 2020, which prevented him from getting back to the United States for the start of the bubble, was actually picked up at a party celebrating Milojevic’s coaching legacy.

“I showed him some things, and after a week, he had already passed me in ability,” Milojevic told ESPN three years ago. “But I saw something wonderful, so I didn’t want to focus his mind on mistakes. I let these things go so he could grow and learn from them.”

With an extreme pain and huge sadness we have received news that today our Deki has left us in his 46th year of life.
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Sa ogromnom tugom smo primili vest da je Dejan Milojević preminuo danas u 46. godini života od posledica srčanog udara.https://t.co/V23f7BhUiD pic.twitter.com/jycaR7ZMBN

— KK Mega (@KKMegaBasket) January 17, 2024