Boban Marjanović (Serbian: Бобан Марјановић; born 15 August 1988 in Boljevac, Serbia) is a Serbian professional basketball player who plays as a centre. Standing 2.24 m (7 ft 4 in) tall and weighing 131 kg (290 lb), he is among the tallest players ever to appear in the NBA, the premier professional basketball league in North America [1][2]. His combination of size, a notably gentle public personality, and an unexpectedly fluent pop-culture presence — from action films to television commercials — made him one of the more recognisable supporting figures in the league during a decade of NBA play [3][4]. Before reaching the NBA he played across several European leagues, including one season at Nizhny Novgorod, a city on the Volga river some 400 km east of Moscow, known during the Soviet period as Gorky (Горький) and then closed to foreign visitors.

Boban Marjanović and the world

Marjanović was born in Boljevac and began his senior career at the Serbian club Hemofarm (Хемофарм), appearing for its youth side in the 2006–07 season and on loan for the club Lions, then for Hemofarm's first team from 2007 to 2010 [5]. As a young player he represented Serbia at age-group level: he took part in the U-18 European Championship in 2006, won the U-19 World Championship in 2007 and the U-20 European Championship in 2008 [2].

In 2010 he signed a three-year contract with CSKA Moscow (ЦСКА Москва), one of Europe's most prominent clubs, and was loaned in early 2011 to Lithuanian side Žalgiris Kaunas (Жальгирис), with whom he won the Lithuanian national championship. His contract with CSKA was terminated by mutual agreement in July 2011 [2].

Marjanović entered the NBA undrafted — meaning no team selected him in the annual draft — when he signed with the San Antonio Spurs on 17 July 2015 [6]. In his debut season he appeared in 54 regular-season games, averaging just over nine minutes per game, 5.5 points, 3.6 rebounds and 0.4 blocks [7]. After one season with the Spurs, the Detroit Pistons signed him to a three-year offer sheet worth $21 million in July 2016; the Spurs, who held matching rights as his previous club, declined to match and he moved to Detroit [8][9]. In January 2018 he was included in a blockbuster trade that sent him, along with Tobias Harris, Avery Bradley and future draft picks, to the Los Angeles Clippers in exchange for Blake Griffin [6].

Later that season he was dealt to the Philadelphia 76ers, where he averaged career-high figures of 8.2 points, 5.1 rebounds, 1.5 assists and 13.9 minutes over 22 games [6]. In the first round of the 2019 playoffs against the Brooklyn Nets he averaged 14.3 points and 6.3 rebounds in just 17.3 minutes per game, prompting the Sixers' coaching staff to keep him on the floor even after he had accumulated five personal fouls [10].

In July 2019 he signed with the Dallas Mavericks [6]. The best game of his NBA career came on 11 March 2020, the night the NBA announced the suspension of its season because of the COVID-19 pandemic: in a 113–97 home win against the Denver Nuggets, Marjanović scored a career high [11]. He re-signed with Dallas in August 2021 [11]; in the Mavericks' seven-game first-round playoff series against the Clippers that year he entered the starting lineup before Game 5 and recorded his first career playoff double-double in Game 7, scoring 14 points and adding a playoff career-high 10 rebounds in 31 minutes [11]. In June 2022 he was included in the trade package sent to the Houston Rockets as part of the deal that brought Christian Wood to Dallas [12]. Across his nine NBA seasons he appeared in 331 games and posted career averages of 5.5 points and 3.6 rebounds per game [1][2].

After the NBA, Marjanović signed with Fenerbahçe of Istanbul for the 2024–25 EuroLeague season [13], then moved to Chinese Basketball Association club Zhejiang Guangsha (浙江广厦) in January 2025 [14]. He subsequently returned to the AdmiralBet ABA League — the top regional club competition linking clubs from the former Yugoslav republics — joining Slovenian club Perspektiva Ilirija after a ten-year absence from that competition [15].

Away from basketball, Marjanović appeared in the 2014 Serbian television and film production Bićemo prvaci sveta (We Will Be World Champions), a biographical sports film directed by Darko Bajić about the founders of Yugoslav basketball, playing Soviet centre Jānis Krūmiņš — a role, as Marjanović noted at the time, that suited him naturally [16][17]. In 2018 he was cast as an assassin in John Wick: Chapter 3 opposite Keanu Reeves [4], and he appeared in Happy Gilmore 2 for Netflix in 2025 [18]. His on-court relationship with Dallas teammate Luka Dončić attracted wide attention on social media and became a recurring element of the Mavericks' public profile [3]. He and former Clipper teammate Tobias Harris filmed a commercial for Goldfish snack crackers that circulated widely in 2021 [19].

The Nizhny Novgorod chapter

Nizhny Novgorod — a city of over a million inhabitants at the confluence of the Volga and Oka rivers in the Nizhny Novgorod Region (Нижегородская область), called Gorky from 1932 to 1990 and closed to foreigners throughout the Soviet era — had by the early 2010s developed a professional basketball club competing at the top level of Russian domestic basketball.

In July 2011, immediately after his contract with CSKA Moscow was dissolved, Marjanović joined Basketball Club Nizhny Novgorod (Баскетбольный клуб «Нижний Новгород») [20]. The signing was made with high expectations: at 221 cm and still only 22 years old, he had already shown his potential at CSKA and with the Lithuanian champions Žalgiris. In Nizhny Novgorod, however, he managed to play in only two games in the BEKO Professional Basketball League (БЕКО ПБЛ, the principal Russian league at the time) and two games in the Unified VTB League (Единая Лига ВТБ), the pan-European competition in which the club also participated [20][21].

He could not establish himself in the team. The club's general manager, Sergei Panov (Сергей Панов), explained publicly that the difficulty lay on the court: Marjanović found it hard to compete in the physical, contact-heavy style of men's professional basketball at that level, though Panov was careful to add that the player caused no problems off the court [22]. In January 2012 the club loaned him to the Serbian side Radnički (Раднички) for the remainder of the season [21].

His time in Nizhny Novgorod was therefore brief — a single, interrupted half-season — yet it formed a distinct stage in his development. After leaving the city he went on to play for Crvena Zvezda (Crvena zvezda Meridianbet, Red Star Belgrade), and it was the combination of his Nizhny Novgorod stint and his subsequent seasons at Crvena Zvezda that caught the attention of NBA scouts and led to the offer from the San Antonio Spurs in the summer of 2015 [23]. Panov later observed that in the NBA Marjanović attracted attention in no small part because of his physical presence and his media personality, comparing him in that respect to Chinese centre Yao Ming [22].

From Nizhny Novgorod to the wider story

The path from Nizhny Novgorod to the NBA was not direct, but the Russian league season formed part of the European record that NBA franchises evaluated when assessing Marjanović. His Nizhny Novgorod contract gave him competitive minutes — however few — in the VTB League, a competition that NBA personnel departments follow closely as a talent pool [23]. The subsequent seasons at Crvena Zvezda, where he developed the consistency of production that Russian basketball had not yet seen from him, completed the picture [23][7]. When San Antonio signed him in July 2015, his undrafted status reflected not an absence of interest but the unusual career path of a player who had moved through a Moscow powerhouse, a Lithuanian champion, a Volga-city mid-tier club, a Serbian loan spell and finally a return to Belgrade before crossing the Atlantic [6][2].

The Nizhny Novgorod episode also illustrates a broader pattern in European basketball of that era: Russian clubs, flush with post-2008 investment and competing simultaneously in domestic leagues and the VTB League, signed young talents from across the former Yugoslav space on relatively short contracts, sometimes retaining them and sometimes releasing them quickly when the fit was poor. Marjanović's case — a two-and-a-half-year CSKA contract that ended after one season and a half, with a Nizhny Novgorod signing immediately following — is a clear example of that circulation [20][21][22].

Legacy

Marjanović holds no monument or named street in Nizhny Novgorod, and his connection to the city is carried primarily in club records and in the memory of the general manager who publicly reflected on the player's trajectory. What the city can claim is a small but documented chapter in the biography of one of the most visually distinctive players in NBA history: a Serbian giant who spent the winter of 2011–12 on the Volga before the wider world came to know him [20][21][22][23].

At the international level, Marjanović's cultural footprint grew steadily after his NBA debut. His role in John Wick: Chapter 3 (2018) [4], his appearance in Happy Gilmore 2 (2025) [18], a widely shared Goldfish crackers commercial [19], and his friendship with Luka Dončić — whose father Saša Dončić intervened to calm Marjanović during a confrontation with supporters at a May 2026 playoff game in Slovenia [24] — all kept him in public view well beyond the basketball court. He remains, in the words of one American sports writer in 2020, the Mavericks' "most lovable player" [3].

Sources

  1. NBA.com — Boban Marjanović – player profile, Houston Rockets (no date)
  2. Basketball-Reference.com — Boban Marjanović – career statistics page (no date)
  3. D Magazine — "Boban The Great," May 2020
  4. Bleacher Report — "Report: Boban Marjanovic Added to Cast of 'John Wick: Chapter 3'," 4 June 2018
  5. Novosti.rs — "Boban Marjanović i mit o pradedinom opanku," 2 May 2013 (in Serbian)
  6. Dallas Mavericks official site — "Mavs sign 76ers free agent center Boban Marjanovic," 23 July 2019 (archive)
  7. isport.ua — Report on Marjanović's first San Antonio Spurs season statistics (in Russian)
  8. ESPN.com — "Boban Marjanovic agrees to contract with Detroit Pistons; San Antonio Spurs have chance to match," 7 July 2016 (archive)
  9. ESPN.com — "Monday's Pistons Links: Boban Marjanovic joins Pistons after Spurs decline to match offer sheet," 11 July 2016 (archive)
  10. NBC Sports Philadelphia — "Boban Marjanovic's size is impossible to ignore, but he's more than a novelty," 19 April 2019
  11. Dallas Mavericks official site — "Boban's back! Marjanović re-signs with Mavericks," 10 August 2021 (archive)
  12. Dallas Mavericks official site — "Mavericks' trade for center Christian Wood is official," 24 June 2022 (archive)
  13. Sport24 (Greek) — "Fenerbahçe announced the signing of Boban Marjanović," 2024
  14. chinanews.com.cn — "Zhejiang Guangsha men's basketball signs former NBA player Boban," 2 January 2025 (in Chinese)
  15. ABA Liga — "After 10 Years Boban Marjanović is Back in ABA, as he Puts on Perspektiva Ilirija Jersey" (no date)
  16. Mondo — "Boban Marjanović glumi u 'Bićemo prvaci sveta'," 3 September 2014 (in Serbian)
  17. Telegraf.rs — Bobi Marjanović postao glumac! I to kakav! (FOTO) - Telegraf.rs
  18. Netflix Tudum — "Happy Gilmore 2 Cast: All of the Cameos, Celebrities & Athletes in the Adam Sandler Sequel," 2025
  19. NBC Sports — Tobias Harris, Boban reunite for new Goldfish commercial (VIDEO) - NBC Sports
  20. NIA Nizhny Novgorod — "Serbian center Boban Marjanović joins BC Nizhny Novgorod" (in Russian)
  21. NIA Nizhny Novgorod — "BC Nizhny Novgorod center Boban Marjanović loaned to Serbian club Radnički until end of season" (in Russian)
  22. news.sportbox.ru — "Panov explained why Marjanović did not stay at Nizhny Novgorod" (archive) (in Russian) (archive)
  23. sport.rambler.ru — Report on Marjanović's Nizhny Novgorod and Crvena Zvezda seasons as path to the NBA (in Russian)
  24. Sportklub — "Boban Marjanovic hteo da tuce navijace navijac Ilirija Sasa Doncic," 24 May 2026 (in Serbian)