If Davidson is going to upset Michigan State, Luka Brajkovic has to come up big
Luka Brajkovic, who will be one of the most significant basketball players for Davidson in its NCAA tournament game vs. Michigan State on Friday, didn’t start out playing basketball.
Born and raised in Austria, the 6-foot-10 Brajkovic began his athletic career as a soccer player. “It’s the biggest sport in Austria,” Brajkovic said. “Every kid does that. Then I got a little bit taller and they put me in the goal.”
Brajkovic wanted to be a striker, though. He liked to score.
“Goalkeeper was too boring,” Brajkovic said. “Plus, you never get the recognition. As a goalkeeper, every time we lost it was my fault because I let in a goal. And every time we won, the credit went to the strikers for scoring the goals. And that sucks.”
At around age 12, Brajkovic changed sports to basketball, where he could score and defend. Now he has become the Atlantic 10 Conference Player of the Year at Davidson, as well as a player who will have to absorb Michigan State’s rugged style of play in one of the final first-round games of March Madness (9:40 p.m. Friday, CBS). It will be Davidson’s first NCAA tourney game since 2018, and if the Wildcats are going to upset Michigan State, Brajkovic must play well.
“They’re known as a really tough team,” Brajkovic said of the seventh-seeded Spartans, who are a 1.5-point favorite against No. 10 Davidson. “They’ll probably go in there and think they’ll just throw us around. And we’ll definitely prove that that’s not going to be the case.”
Although Brajkovic is a senior, this will be his first NCAA tournament game at Davidson. His senior class kept alive an amazing stat that has encapsulated much of coach Bob McKillop’s 33-year head-coaching career at the school: Every four-year player at Davidson since 1994 has played on at least one team that qualified for the NCAA tournament.
“We were scared that we’d be the ones who weren’t going to make it,” Brajkovic said.
Davidson (27-6) earned its bid with a spectacular regular season. The Wildcats went 15-3 in the conference and won the A-10 regular season outright. Then the Wildcats got to the conference tournament final, only to lose a six-point lead in the final 95 seconds to Richmond. A 64-62 loss resulted. That left Davidson needing to secure an at-large bid, which it received three hours later.
Brajkovic’s stats aren’t eye-popping for a conference player of the year. He ranks third on the team in scoring, behind guards Foster Loyer (a Michigan State transfer) and Hyunjung Lee, with 14.2 points per game. He leads them in rebounding (7.2) and blocks (36). He also shoots 40.7% from three-point range and time and again this season has come up with a big basket for the Wildcats in the final moments. He will need to stay out of foul trouble — an occasional problem for him — all weekend.
Brajkovic admits to another occasional problem, too — self-doubt.
McKillop tried to help him with that this summer. “In our locker room, we have a nice, elegant display of all the conference players of the year we’ve had, no matter what conference we’ve been in,” the coach said. “And there’s some space up there. And Luka was in Austria and I took a picture of that wall. I may have put a piece of his paper with his name written on it in a blank space. And I said, ‘This can be yours, if you want it.’ ”
Brajkovic, who had never been an all-conference player in his first three seasons at Davidson, took that to heart. “I really couldn’t believe it, but it’s like Coach McKillop spoke it into existence,” Brajkovic said. “He sold me on it.”
Like many of Davidson’s players, Brajkovic was modestly recruited. He played for the under-18 Austrian national team, but the only two recruiting visits he took were to Penn State and Davidson. McKillop said he flew to Austria to visit his family twice, and that helped seal the deal. He has gained about 35 pounds over the course of four years at Davidson, as well as stamina and confidence. Now a senior, he will have some decisions to make after the year is over as to whether to try to play professionally right away or take the extra year provided by COVID-related rules and play elsewhere in college, at a school that has an on-campus graduate program (Davidson doesn’t).
For now, though, Brajkovic is living in the moment, as is his coach.
McKillop said he has been perturbed that he didn’t call more plays for Brajkovic in the Richmond game. Brajkovic took a modest nine shots during that loss and scored 13 points.
“I kick myself for not getting him the ball enough against Richmond,” McKillop said. “That’s on me.”
McKillop won’t make that mistake again against Michigan State. Now it’s up to Brajkovic.
This story was originally published March 17, 2022 at 9:01 AM.
