He’s no Robert Horry yet, but that’s a good goal to set.
If you watched a lot of EuroBasket like we did, you got a good look at rookie Minnesota forward Nemanja Bjelica. The 2010 draft pick was the EuroLeague MVP last season and at EuroBasket led Serbia to a top four finish averaging a team-high 13.9 points a game on 56 percent shooting, and he hit 37.5 percent from three. But maybe what people remember best is the game-winner over Germany.
That earned him a nickname, reports Jerry Zgoda at the Star-Tribune (hat tip Ball Don’t Lie):When it rolls off his tongue, it sounds something like, “Nem-en-ya Bee-a-lihzt-ah.” When others say it, it sounds like everything from “Nah-man-jah” to “Bah-jell-ah-kah.”
By any pronunciation, they know him as the 2015 Euroleague MVP and a star at the recently completed Eurobasket championships whom many called just “Professor Big Shots” because of its simplicity.
That is awesome.
But it’s one thing to be professor big shots in Europe, it’s another thing entirely to do it in the NBA. If he can live up to that, Minnesota will have another young stud to go with Andrew Wiggins and Karl-Anthony Towns.