The morning after Denver won the 2023 NBA championship, Associated Press reporters found Branislav Jokić outside his horse club in Sombor, Serbia, wearing a blue Nuggets jersey.
Inside his office, every trophy on the wall was for a horse.
His youngest son had just won the biggest prize in professional basketball. The awards in Branislav’s office belonged to animals. He had not been in Denver for any of it.
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Who Is Branislav Jokić?
Branislav Jokić is the father of Denver Nuggets center Nikola Jokić and a retired agricultural engineer from Sombor, a city of about 41,000 people in Serbia’s Vojvodina province, near the Hungarian border. He has lived there his entire life. He runs Horse Club “Vojvodjanin” in Sombor, where the family stable competes on Serbia’s harness racing circuit, and he served as president of KK Joker, the Sombor basketball club the family funded, from 2017 until January 2025.
Quick facts:
- Full name: Branislav Jokić
- Profession: Retired agricultural engineer
- Hometown: Sombor, Serbia (Vojvodina province)
- Sons: Strahinja, Nemanja, and Nikola Jokić
- Horse Club: President of Vojvodjanin; family stable is called Dream Catcher
- Basketball: Former president of KK Joker (2017 to January 2025)
The stable’s name, Dream Catcher, comes from the first horse Nikola ever bought. When Ynet News journalist Zeev Avrahami visited Branislav at his horse farm in June 2023, he found an office lined with cups, plaques, and ribbons, all won by horses. The only image of Nikola in the room was a small black-and-white photograph of the boy as a child, sitting in a horse-drawn carriage.
The Afternoon He Took Nikola to the Track
Nikola Jokić told The Athletic in 2020 how the horse obsession started:
“I was probably 12 or 13 when I got into it. My dad took me to a horse race in our city. We went to the race, and I said, ‘I kinda like this.’ And I just fell in love with the horses.”
Branislav had been around horses his entire life. He told AFP that as a child, Nikola cleaned the stables each morning before school, and described the passion plainly: “He inherited this from me.”
What started as liking turned serious. As a teenager, Nikola quit basketball to pursue horse racing. He told SLAM magazine he finished fourth in a race during those years. The track was not a weekend interest for him. He was considering it as a career.
Branislav stepped in with a condition, which he described to the Associated Press in June 2023:
“He started growing, both in height and in size, and he started to become aware that he could be a basketball player, but he had a great desire in those days. He would say, ‘Dad, I want to become a horseman.’ And I used to tell him: ‘Son, become a basketball player first, and you’ll become a great horseman later.'”
Nikola took the advice. He moved to KK Mega Basket in Belgrade around 2012. The Denver Nuggets picked him 41st overall in the second round of the 2014 NBA Draft.
Branislav stayed in Sombor.
The Call That Came From Sremska Mitrovica
After Nikola moved to Belgrade, Branislav remained in Sombor. He was not at the KK Mega away game in Sremska Mitrovica where it first became clear that Nikola had an NBA future.
His older son Strahinja and the agent Misko Raznatovic were there. They came back and told him. Branislav described the moment in former Denver Post journalist Mike Singer’s biography of Nikola, Why So Serious? (Harper, December 2024):
“After two years in Mega, after a game in Sremska Mitrovica, my son, Strahinja, and Misko Raznatovic told me that Nikola was on the path to the NBA.”
He was in Sombor when he found out.
Two Clubs, One City
While Nikola built his career in Colorado, Branislav ran the basketball side of things back home.
KK Joker started as KK SO Koš, a club founded in Sombor in 2002 where Nikola played as a child before leaving for Belgrade. In 2017, after Nikola had become an established NBA player, the club was renamed KK Joker after his nickname, and the Jokić family stepped in as the main financial backers.
The family’s roles at KK Joker:
| Family Member | Role |
|---|---|
| Branislav Jokić | Club President |
| Strahinja Jokić | General Director |
| Nemanja Jokić | Board Member |
Source: BasketNews, ABA League official records, KK Joker official website
Per the club’s own website, the goal was to grow youth basketball in Sombor and the wider West Bačka region, with an academy running from age five through senior competition. KK Joker climbed through Serbia’s divisions and reached the ABA League Second Division for the 2024-25 season.
It ended in January 2025.
On January 19, Strahinja told club staff the family was stepping away. Financial support ended that day. The club gave up a secured ABA League playoff spot. Head coach Vladimir Lucic confirmed the details to Serbian outlet Mozzart Sport:
“Jokic family pulled away from the club. They were the main investors and people who were responsible that everything in Joker is functioning well. We had a meeting with Jokic family, precisely his brother Strahinja, who told us that he will be in the club until 19th of January, on that date he will leave it and won’t invest in it anymore, claiming players and coaches are free to go.”
Branislav made no public statement.
Watching the Championship From Sombor
For the 2023 NBA Finals, Branislav did not travel to Denver.
He watched the early games with his wife, Nikolina, in Sombor, then sat alone through the rest. He explained why to Zeev Avrahami of Ynet News during a visit to the horse farm in June 2023:
“I didn’t go to the NBA Finals because someone had to take care of all the horses here. At the start of the fifth game in the finals, I was with my wife, but after that, I was alone. I was too nervous.”
The morning after Denver won, AP photographer Darko Vojinovic found Branislav outside Horse Club Vojvodjanin in the Nuggets jersey. Branislav spoke to the wire service about his son’s journey:
“He had something special within him. I rarely mention it today, but I simply knew that he would be a good basketball player. But as to what heights he would reach, nobody could have known then.”
He said the same thing to Ynet from a different angle: “We knew he would be good, but not this good. He was the greatest and the chunkiest.”
On the championship itself: “It’s just amazing. I don’t think this great accomplishment can ever be repeated again.”
He told AP reporters that Nikola had grown from a local kid, someone “a bit overweight at one point,” through the regional leagues in Serbia to a title in Denver.
Six days after the championship, Nikola was back in Sombor for the horse races. When reporters at the hippodrome tried to reach him, Branislav handled it. “He told me, ‘Dad, I have had enough of publicity during these past few days,'” he said. “And I believe him.”
What He Is Building Back Home
In early August 2024, the day after Serbia won Olympic bronze at the Paris Games, Nikola returned to Sombor almost immediately. His horse, Brenno Laumar, won a race that week. Branislav gave an interview to Sportal, one of Serbia’s main sports outlets.
On what the family was planning for Sombor:
“Nikola enjoys the simple things in life. We are planning to build family homes and set up a hippodrome so he can satisfy his love for horses. What more could he need?”
On why Nikola has never bought an apartment in Belgrade:
“He’s not interested in that. He has music here and a favorite bar where he goes on Fridays and Saturdays with his childhood friends. He doesn’t hang out with new friends. It’s hard for him to accept new people around him. They have to be from the world of basketball or horses. Something else is very difficult.”
As of May 2026, no reporting had confirmed the family hippodrome in Sombor as complete.
The Race in Subotica, July 2025
In late July 2025, Nikola Jokić’s horse, Demon Dell’Est, won the Dužijanac, an annual racing event held in Subotica, Serbia. Nikola stood at the rail with his hands over his mouth as the horse came in. His head went down. He jumped a fence, ran onto the track, and cried while spraying champagne on the driver and the team. NBA.com covered the moment and described it as some of the most visible emotion he had shown publicly in years.
Branislav took his son to the horse races in Sombor for the first time roughly eighteen years before that afternoon in Subotica.
He is still in Sombor.
