Serbia Beats Italy 76-64 in Pesaro, Jokic Sick
Serbia's basketball team defeated Italy 76-64 in Pesaro, with Aleksa Avramovic scoring 20 points. Head coach Dusan Alimpijevic revealed after the game that Nikola Jokic had been playing sick for days.
Pesaro, mixed zone, moments after the final buzzer. Dusan Alimpijevic stands in front of reporters and says something nobody in the arena expected to hear: his captain had been sick for days, had told no one, and had simply shown up to play.
That admission came only after the scoreboard had long settled on 76-64 for Serbia. Up to that point, the game had looked like another grinding, physical battle against an Italian side that rarely gives up ground easily, especially not in front of its own fans. Alimpijevic knew exactly what he was walking into. Wins over this Italy generation have never come easily for Serbia.
After the game, the coach admitted that what mattered most to him was simply that his team held on when it had to. “I have to be very happy about this win because we played in a good atmosphere,” Alimpijevic said, before explaining why the bench was more than a line in the box score. “The impact of the guys off the bench was incredible.”
The game in Pesaro, part of the second phase of Mundobasket 2027 qualifying, was played on the evening of August 31 in front of roughly 9,500 spectators. Serbia kept the first quarter tight, then pulled away in the second to build a 14-point lead. Italy did not fold. The hosts chipped away at that margin through the rest of the first half and kept coming in the third quarter, eventually tying the game at 47-47. It was the kind of moment, as Italian media themselves noted, that brought back memories of 2022 and the EuroBasket collapse that once cost this Serbian generation a game it had already won. Not this time. Serbia regained the lead immediately, stretched it back into double digits in the final quarter, and held Italy to just ten points in that period.
At halftime, Serbia’s lead stood at nine points. Heading into the final ten minutes, it was down to three. In other words, the game was far closer than the final score suggests.
The night’s biggest contributors did not wear an NBA number one. Aleksa Avramovic finished with 20 points, three rebounds and three assists, while Marko Guduric added 19 points and four assists. Sources differ on his third stat line: Kurir credits him with two rebounds, while Sportska centrala lists two steals. Ognjen Dobric scored nine points off the bench. Nikola Jokic finished with eight points, eight rebounds and one assist in under 24 minutes, well below his usual workload. For Italy, Nico Mannion was the top scorer with 23 points, four assists and two rebounds, and Simone Fontecchio added 15.
Only once the numbers were on the board did Alimpijevic get to the real story of the night.
“But this gentleman, who was next to me, was very sick these last few days. He refused to give up and leave his team,” Alimpijevic said of Jokic.
He added: “That’s why we’re proud to have a captain like him.”
The win moves Serbia into second place in Group J at 6-2. Sources disagree on the picture at the top of the table: B92 has Turkey at a perfect 8-0, while Sportska centrala had them at 7-0 at the time of writing, with a game against Iceland still in progress. Italy dropped to 5-3 after the loss, Lithuania sits at 4-4, and Bosnia and Herzegovina and Iceland share fifth place at 3-5. The top three teams in the group advance to Qatar 2027, meaning Serbia, despite trailing Turkey, still controls its own path to qualification.
Four rounds remain in qualifying. Serbia hosts Lithuania on November 26, then faces Italy three days later on November 29. February and March bring a home-and-away set with Iceland, on the road on February 26 and at home on March 1. For that November window, Alimpijevic will have to plan without Jokic, Bogdan Bogdanovic and Nikola Jovic, all three tied up with NBA commitments at that point in the season.
What this game showed was not just that Serbia can beat Italy after seven years of waiting for that particular result. It showed that this team can hold up even when its best player is nowhere near full strength physically, and for a November window without three NBA regulars, that matters more than the final margin on the scoreboard. The next test comes November 26, against a Lithuania squad currently boycotting its own federation, which means the game in Pesaro may well have been the one that already settled these qualifiers.
