The NBA league has a lot of players who call themselves tough guys, some are really tough, and some are just bullying soft and afraid of hard.
If NBA players are now voted for the players who are most reluctant to clash on the court, Black Belt Captain Johnson should be at the top.
However, if this proposition had been five or six years ago, Nikola Pekovic would have been on the list, I don't know if you would have had any impression of this player.
Originally from Montenegro, Pekovic entered the professional arena in 2003 when he was only 17 years old. He has played in the national leagues of Montenegro, Serbia and Greece and has won many championships.
Experience in the Europa League gave him the opportunity to knock on the door of the NBA, and the Timberwolves selected him with the first pick in the second round at the 2008 draft, and officially signed in 2010 to land in the NBA.
Wearing the No. 14 jersey, Pekovic became the Timberwolves' inside pillar. Perkovic's biggest advantage is his big size, 2 meters 11 tall, weighing 139 kilograms, so he is also called "Montenegro Great White Bear" by fans.
His outstanding strength gave him a good explosive power, and he was aggressive on both ends of the attack, but at the same time he felt good, and the sense of position under the basket was excellent, which was definitely a nightmare for most centers at that time.
At his peak, Warcraft Howard once said of Pekovich, his hulk is simply a mixed martial arts player, he is more powerful than me.
In an interview yesterday, Draymond also said that Perkovic was the strongest person he had ever held in his life. In Zhuang Shen's view, when he is in place with Pekovich, he is like a child, who can be pushed around at will, and he can't stop the former from hitting the inside line with his back.
Pekovic not only made his opponents fearful, but even his teammates were a little afraid of him. LaVine, who was selected by the Timberwolves in 14 years, wanted to continue wearing the No. 14 jersey after entering the NBA, but when he saw Thatkovic was wearing it, he didn't even dare to ask about the number.
What makes him a little frightened lies in two details. He had seen Pekovich boxing in the locker room, sweating profusely, slamming into sandbags.
He had also seen the former's large meals. He described Pekovich as a stone made of muscles.
On the court, Pekovic has had a short but decent NBA career. In April 2013, Pekovic won the Western Conference Of the Week best for his outstanding performance, one of the few honors of his career.
That season, he averaged 16.3 points and 8.8 rebounds per game, shooting 52 percent from the field, a performance that also impressed timberwolves management, who chose to renew his contract in the summer of 2013, with a contract worth $60 million for five years.
After getting a big contract and only playing good for one year, he was reimbursed for the ankle injury season in 15 years, and only played 12 games in 16 years, and the statistics fell sharply. Never returned to the field, and in the summer of 2017, the Timberwolves officially announced the layoff of Pekovic.
Looking back at Pekovic's six-year career, being big was his biggest advantage on the field, but it was also the reason for injuring his ankle and ending his career prematurely.
Even so, he's luckier than most players, earning more than $60 million in a six-year NBA career and basically having peace of mind.
His experience in the NBA is not the most legendary place in his life, but the most amazing thing for fans is his life after retirement.
In Montenegro, with a population of only 630,000, Pekovic's family is quite powerful in the local area and in neighboring Serbia, if to put it bluntly, their family is a well-known local gang.
After retiring from the military, Pekovich naturally inherited the family business, ran some of the family's business, and was rumored last year that he was investigated for drug trafficking. In such a family, it is doomed to live an ordinary and stable life.
Some players choose to be farmers after retirement, some players enter the business world to open a company after retiring, some players go home to inherit the "big business", people have their own lives, some people return to the ordinary, some people yearn for legends, and each writes a different life.