Kokoskov told Doncic about how, during Yugoslavia's run to the 1989 EuroBasket championship in Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia), Petrovic would wake up before 6 a.m., drag an assistant coach into his red Porsche 911, and drive to a gym for a workout while the rest of the team slept. He would return two or three hours later, dripping in sweat, and eat breakfast with his groggy teammates.

"With all these goals you have in front of you," Kokoskov remembers telling Doncic, "you should hear these stories. You should know what it will take."

That is what has perhaps been forgotten about Petrovic when we reminisce about his stunning, braggadocious, and tragically short rise to All-NBA prominence (as the Nets did in holding a touching tribute for Petrovic on Monday night): the work it took to get there. It was Petrovic's defining trait to those who knew him best, and longest. As a kid, Petrovic insisted on playing against older boys, says Neven Spahija, who grew up on the same street as Petrovic in Sibenik, Croatia, and has coached all over the world -- including with the Hawks under Mike Budenholzer, and now as the head coach of Maccabi Tel Aviv.

In the mid-1980s, after a national team training camp in Sarajevo, the players who lived in what is now Croatia took a six-hour, overnight bus ride home. Petrovic's mother, Biserka, was waiting to pick him up at about 6 a.m., recalls Stojko Vrankovic, perhaps Petrovic's closest friend on the team. Vrankovic was continuing on to Zadar. As Petrovic got off the bus, Vrankovic asked him what he would do that morning.

"I just expected he would say he was going to sleep," Vrankovic says. Petrovic was heading to the gym, right that moment, to get a couple hundred shots up.

"From the standpoint of work ethic and getting better, I put him in [Dirk] Nowitzki's class," says Rick Carlisle, who was an assistant with the Nets during Petrovic's two-plus seasons there.

http://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/22590062/zach-lowe-drazen-petrovic-lasting-basketball-legacy-nba

jebeni njemacki autoputi.... sve bi bilo puno drugacije ......

25 godina je otkako nas je Dražen napustio. 

Mirno ti more želim kapetane