Upon arrival last summer from Serbia, Lazar Stefanovic went through the normal motions of any freshman, feeling out his new teammates and coaching staff at the University of Utah.
At one point in the early going, the 6-foot-7 wing began telling first-year head coach Craig Smith that his nickname was ‘Stef.’ Smith, as he tells it, refused to call him that.
“You have to earn that respect to get a nickname,” Smith said.
It hasn’t taken Stefanovic long to start getting some respect.
Fitting in at Utah
Stefanovic arrived in Salt Lake City in the middle of August, fresh off helping Serbia’s under-19 national team to a fourth-place finish at the FIBA Under-19 World Cup five weeks earlier in Latvia. His arrival date gave Stefanovic, 19 years old and in the United States for the first time, about a week to get himself together before the fall semester and fall workouts began.
The rest of Smith’s team was on campus through the summer working out, while Stefanovic was playing with his national team, so by the time everyone was back on campus and fall workouts began, Stefanovic was understandably going to be a bit behind everyone else. Or, so Smith thought.
During the first team workout of the fall, the Utes were working on some things defensively, things they had worked on all summer without Stefanovic. Smith and the staff threw some of those things at Stefanovic, who watched, then jumped in.
“He makes the game so easy for everybody on both ends, but on that drill, he watched two or three things we had done all summer, he hopped in there and it was like he had done it for the whole summer with us,” said Smith, furiously snapping his fingers as he spoke to indicate how quickly Stefanovic picked things up.
That was at least an indication of where Stefanovic could go quickly as a freshman, but this first season has not been without hiccups. There have been shooting struggles and missed assignments, but there have also been quite a few moments of brilliance, moments of optimism, moments that remind you of the gaudy international résumé Stefanovic showed up here with.
Twenty-four games into his college career, Stefanovic is now entrenched as a starter, a key rotation guy, not only now, but for the long term as Smith tries to build something at the Huntsman Center.
To get Stefanovic to this point, though, Smith, lead assistant coach Eric Peterson, and the rest of the coaching staff first had to save Stefanovic’s commitment to the Utes.
Stefanovic, who has 34 games of professional experience with two different clubs in Serbian KSL, that basketball-mad country’s top division, signed a National Letter of Intent with Utah on Nov. 11, 2020.
When Larry Krystkowiak was fired after the 2020-21 season, that put things into something of a holding pattern, even with Stefanovic having signed his letter months earlier.
“I really didn’t know what to think,” Stefanovic said. “I was committed here, and when that happened, I didn’t know what to do. I knew this was a great university, I still wanted to come here, but I didn’t know who the new coach would be. Are they going to like me? Are they still going to want me to come here? I tried not to think about it, I didn’t want to stress over it. I just thought I would wait for the new coach to come and talk to him. We’ll see what happens next.”
Recruiting Lazar Stefanovic
The recruiting part of college basketball is a subculture rooted in building relationships. Recruiting internationally puts even more of an onus on relationships, seeing as how getting face-to-face time with recruits, parents, scouts, and coaches can’t happen as much as it can in the United States.
Former Krystkowiak assistant Andy Hill, the lead on Stefanovic’s recruitment, is widely considered a strong international recruiter, but so is Peterson. When Smith and Peterson were at Utah State from 2018-2021, those Aggies teams were full of international guys, most notably Portuguese big man Neemias Queta, now a rookie with the Sacramento Kings.
Several years ago, Peterson walked into an event in Europe wearing Utah State gear. A guy he had never met before came beelining up to him and introduced himself. His name was Luca Drca, coincidentally a former Utes guard who played in 122 games from 2006-10. Drca was there working for Eurohopes, an international scouting service.
Peterson and Drca built a rapport, if not a friendship, that would one day help seal Stefanovic’s commitment.
Beginning when Stefanovic was 16, Peterson had already seen him plenty on recruiting trips overseas. The coach knew Stefanovic was essentially stashed away with one of the Serbian KSL teams, KK Partizan. Given that KSL veers towards the higher end of European domestic leagues, Stefanovic wasn’t playing a ton, so there wasn’t a lot of film. For all intents and purposes, Stefanovic was under the radar.
When Peterson arrived at Utah, he called a couple of buddies overseas to do more homework on Stefanovic, but one of his first calls was to Drca, who, like Stefanovic, is from Belgrade.
“He knew him, he’d seen him play a lot,” Peterson said. “He said ‘listen, you have to do anything you can to keep that kid on your roster.’”
But the recruiting process had to begin anew, and Stefanovic had options. He could have kept to his NLI, he could have requested a release from that NLI, to which Utah would have very likely given it, or he could have pushed forward with a professional career.
“There was a big question mark on that, should I keep playing pro or should I go to school,” said Stefanovic, who noted in Nov. 2020 that he had interest from Toledo, Stanford, New Mexico, UC Santa Barbara, USC and South Florida among others. “I played with a lot of guys that used to play in the United States, then came overseas to play professionally. They helped me to make the decision. One thing on my mind was you can turn pro whenever you want, but university is something you can do once, now. All of it, my parents, the situation, it all went into that decision.”
Stefanovic’s parents, Goran and Radmilla, were going to let their youngest child make his own decision, but Lazar was going to lean on them to help make that decision. They even went as far as to put a pros-and-cons list down on paper.
Within the first couple of weeks of Smith’s hiring, Stefanovic and his family got on a Zoom call with the entire coaching staff. They thought Stefanovic was a perfect fit, that his style fit in with the roster they were trying to put together.
An unwavering commitment
Ultimately, the prospect of getting an American education weighed heavily. That isn’t always the case with international recruits, especially if there is money to be made overseas, which, in Stefanovic’s case, was part of the equation.
Credit to Radmilla, who gave her son a reading list of 10 American books he was supposed to finish before arriving in the United States. Whether or not Stefanovic got through the list is unclear, but in his defense he was pretty busy over the summer.
Stefanovic played for Serbia at the FIBA Under-16 European Championship in 2018, but his inclusion on Serbia’s Under-19 World Cup entrant marked a significant step forward. The biennial global event is filled with young overseas pros, future overseas pros and, in the case of the United States, high-end graduating high school seniors and young high-major college talent.
In seven games, Stefanovic averaged 12.4 points, 4.3 rebounds and 2.4 assists in 29 minutes per game. He scored 15 points in a team-high 37 minutes in a semifinal loss to France, followed by 16 points, albeit on 6-for-16 shooting, to go along with six assists and five rebounds the next day in a bronze-medal game loss to Canada.
“It’s a high level,” Peterson said. “You get over there, and you’re playing at U-19 Worlds, that’s a high level of basketball. Just watching him this summer, we knew what we had before that, but after that, I think there were some pretty happy faces in the office.”
Those faces are happier now that Stefanovic is in Salt Lake City.
The Utes saw an exodus of talent from Krystkowiak’s final roster. Timmy Allen and Alfonso Plummer were out the door almost immediately. Mikael Jantunen went home to Finland to turn pro. Ian Martinez left, Pelle Larsson left, and while Rylan Jones began offseason workouts under Smith’s watch, he, too, left.
Stefanovic never wavered.
“Guys were leaving and every time a guy would leave, he would call me and tell me, ‘Coach, we’re fine. If they don’t want to be here, that’s fine. We’re going to win with or without those guys,’” Peterson said. “That’s where, as a coach, you kind of just sit back and smile because it’s clear he’s about the right things.”
That’s one of the reasons why Smith calls him “Stef” now.
