Inside Nuggets’ international scout Rafal Juc’s rise to the top of the European scouting world

Headlined by Nikola Jokic, the Rolodex of NBA players who have come through the Nuggets’ European pipeline that connects clubs from leagues in the Balkans, Spain and elsewhere throughout the continent to Denver, runs deep.

From Jusuf Nurkic, who Denver acquired in a 2014 draft night trade and has since moved on to Portland, to 2017 second-round pick Vlatko Cancar, whose impressive Summer League showcase has him on track to join the Nuggets’ roster in 2019, and Juancho Hernangomez, who could carve out significant minutes in the Nuggets’ rotation this season, Denver is at the top of its class when it comes to the European scouting scene.

That comes as no surprise when scanning the Nuggets’ front office roster, which boasts extensive European flavor and experience. President of basketball operations Tim Connelly rose through the NBA ranks as a scout and was heavily involved in international talent evaluation in both of his previous stops in Washington and New Orleans before he arrived in Denver in 2013. General manager Arturas Karnisovas was a legendary player in Europe in the 1990s and early 2000s and was the director of global scouting for the Rockets for five years before he was hired by the Nuggets. Like Karnisovas, both director of basketball strategy and analytics Tommy Balcetis and basketball operations associate Martynas Pocius hail from Lithuania.

But no one in Denver’s front office has been more hands-on when its come to evaluating overseas talent or has watched more European basketball over the past few years than Nuggets’ international scout Rafal Juc.

“I don’t know if there’s a more internationally connected franchise than us,” Juc said by phone a few days after returning to his home base in Poland after a four-week, 50-game scouting marathon that took him across Europe with stops in Germany, Macedonia and Latvia.

Juc’s latest trek across Europe was nothing out of the ordinary for the well-traveled 26-year-old who has been working full-time for the Nuggets since 2013. A Warsaw, Poland, native, Juc fell in love with the sport in 2004 while watching the Pistons and Lakers face off in the NBA Finals.

Juc played with the Polish basketball club Ochota while in high school but realized by the time he hit 17-years old that professional basketball wasn’t in his future. His small frame and limited athletic ability weren’t going to take him far, but Juc couldn’t imagine life without the game.

His next step would gradually take him on a path into the scouting world. Juc grew up next to the Polish Basketball Federation in Warsaw and would walk through its doors day in and day out to try and solicit higher-ups for an opportunity to cut his teeth and learn about a different side of the game. His persistence eventually paid off. Juc landed an internship with the Federation in their Public Relations Department.

After he was initially tasked with standard PR chores, like keeping up the organization’s website and conducting interviews with players, Juc eventually got the opportunity to travel to junior basketball events with the Polish National Team. Soon, he started networking with scouts.

In 2011 at the Under-18 European Championships in Wroclaw, Poland, Juc got one of his first big breaks. He started to make connections with NBA scouts and high-level executives from across the league. To them, Juc was an untapped source of knowledge and an endless database that held insider information about top players across Poland and Europe that he had grown up playing against and interacted with. In true NBA quid-pro-quo fashion, Juc asked for advice about getting into scouting in return.

After the U-18 Championships ended, Juc began his own amateur scouting career. For three days straight following the tournament, he pulled all-nighters, pouring over coaching clinics on the web and writing his first scouting reports. Juc started to volunteer with Eurohopes.com, a European scouting service used by countless teams throughout the continent and was given a small but valuable travel budget. It allowed him to venture out across Europe and network with more high-ranking NBA officials.

“I didn’t miss a tournament for two years from 2011-13,” Juc said.

Two of the executives Juc met during that two-year span, Connelly and Karnisovas, would later become his future bosses.

In 2012, he landed a part-time scouting job with the Jazz, which gave him legitimacy and the structure of working for an NBA team. Then, in 2013 while scouting at the Under-20 European Championships in Estonia, Juc got a call from Karnisovas. The Nuggets’ then-assistant general manager had just been hired in Denver and encouraged Juc to apply for the open international scouting job with the Nuggets.

“He had a little buzz around him as a young talent evaluator at that time,” Karnisovas said. “He visited every youth tournament. He knew players well. He played a little bit. I kind of try to stay away from hiring someone traditional and said, ‘This could be the guy for us.'”

Juc was hired a few weeks later. At just 21, he became the youngest full-time scout in league history.

“We briefly knew each other. We had just a couple of conversations, but he took a chance of me,” Juc said of Karnisovas. “I was joking with them, the very first year I should have paid the Nuggets because they were teaching me like I was in school, giving me the structure. Arturas showed me the ropes. He explained to me step by step how to get intel, how to travel, how to put your schedule together. Looking back and reading my reports from the past, I’m not joking. I don’t know how they could have paid me for that.”

Juc still calls Poland home, but he travels between 150 and 200 days per year. Somehow, the amount of basketball he watches exceeds the number of days he spends on the road.

If there’s a prospect coming through the European ranks who has even the slightest chance to sniff the NBA’s radar, Juc has seen him play both on tape and in person, and likely on more than one occasion. It might not always come in a live game setting. Some of the younger prospects Juc keeps tabs on throughout the year don’t get regular minutes with their club, so he has to stop in and check up on them during their team’s practices.

Before he watches a player live, Juc always digests a minimum of two or three of that players’ games on tape to get a feel for their strengths and weaknesses, his tendencies and the general way that he plays. When he eventually watches players live, he focuses on how they interact with their surroundings and the aspects of the basketball that don’t show up on film like their body language, speed and athleticism.

“For me, if the player is going to go off and have the best game of his life when I’m watching him in person, or if he’s going to have a day off and not score at all, it doesn’t really matter,” Juc said. “Because I want to see how he communicates with his teammates and coaches, how he approaches obstacles and how he treats fans and teammates. So when I watch players live it’s much more about the game itself.”

For Juc, scouting is separated into actual talent evaluation and networking. Talent evaluation focuses on three components: athleticism, basketball skill and the mental makeup of a prospect.

“We say basketball skills are the easiest part of talent evaluation. Most educated fans can do it themselves. It’s not that difficult to figure out who is the best player on the court even if you don’t know that much about the game of basketball,” said Juc. “Scouting is not as much about identifying the top talent, but it’s about trying to project who is going to do the best and fit the best on your team.

“You always have to have the mindset of how is this guy going to fit on our team? How is our coach is going to like this guy? How is he going to mesh with the rest of the group? The most challenging part of scouting is to make this mental picture, this psych profile of a player because as NBA teams, most of the contracts are guaranteed, and we spend so much money that we try to minimize the risk. We say scouting is basically crossing guys off to try and minimize risk.”

When Juc isn’t pouring over game tape or traveling to the far reaches of Europe, he’s on the phone or sending emails, trying to get a pulse and feel for the latest rumblings around the players he’s focused on. Juc spends the majority of his time communicating with agents and scouts regarding players he’s watching and has ascended to a status around the continent, thanks to his own networking across the basketball world and Connelly and Karnisovas’ contacts, where he can walk into any European gym in any country to watch a player.

“He has that personality where he’ll come to a game and leave with 50 contacts and go to dinner with them too,” Karnisovas said. “He has a likable personality, and 80 percent of our work is communication and interaction with people, and he’s very good with that. He’s been invaluable.”

Juc has seen every European prospect who’s been drafted over the past five years play in-person before they arrived in the states. If there’s a prospect he likes, Juc will travel to see the player live as many as 10 times, as he did with both Jokic and Nurkic, before they were both drafted by Denver.

As the Nuggets’ only talent evaluator with boots on the ground in Europe full-time, Juc’s role carries loads of responsibility. The meticulous regimen that has him on the road for half the calendar year is a required practice.

The hours upon hours of watching every level of European basketball both in-person and on Synergy, an online cataloged scouting database with film and game tape on players throughout the world, helps Juc formulate a tiered master list of prospects. The Nuggets then focus their efforts on and turn their attention to those players for the upcoming season.

“There’s a lot of pressure to put the list together and not miss on anybody,” Juc said. “But I have a ton of trust from Tim and Arturas and the rest of the group.”

Most of Denver’s front office travels to Europe at least once per year, but the Nuggets’ top two decision-makers trust Juc as one of their main points of contact between them and Denver’s draft-and-stash prospects throughout the season. Four years ago, Jokic was one of those prospects after the Nuggets selected the big man 41st overall in the 2014 draft and allowed him to develop overseas for another year.

Juc liked Jokic throughout the pre-draft process, and he was firmly on Denver’s radar heading into the draft, but no one in the Nuggets’ front office thought he’d develop into a franchise cornerstone. Most were hoping he’d fill a role as a reserve big man and could back up Nurkic, who was taken 25 spots ahead of him in 2014, and provide quality rotation minutes at the NBA level.

“The following year after he got drafted I was coming over to Serbia a lot to see him play, to build a relationship with him and to follow his progress,” Juc said. “I was shaking my head because he was only scratching the surface. He didn’t even realize how good he can be. He was throwing all these behind-the-back passes, no-look passes, playmaking, taking threes. He had a lot of opportunity and the ability to learn from his mistakes. He made huge progress from the beginning of the year until the end and eventually he won the MVP of the Adriatic League. Everybody in our front office started to feel like, ‘Okay. We rolled the dice with the guy the year before, but now he put it all together, and there’s a chance he’s going to be a really good player.’”

With Jokic, Juc and Denver’s front office operating in unison, the Nuggets have stocked their roster full of European skill-sets that have them playing a foreign brand of basketball that’s more recognizable overseas than in the NBA.

The pillars of the Nuggets’ style of play, from their constant ball movement to a read-and-react, equal-opportunity motion offense and the playmaking big men who Denver play through are are all hardcore staples of European hoops.

“We live with the same rules here in Denver that we do in Europe,” Juc said.

Nuggets coach Michael Malone, who in December 2016 centered his offense around a still relatively unknown former second-round pick, is also a believer in the European philosophy and style of play. 

“When a lot of American guys come over to Europe for the first time and watch some games over here, they like to joke, ‘We Americans discovered the game of basketball, but you guys in Europe play the way it’s supposed to be played,’” Juc said.

Scouting Europe to the extent that Denver does isn’t for the weak. It takes a commitment from a team’s entire front office, from the top decision-maker to lower-level associates to evaluate the players upon players who shuffle through the continent’s multiple divisions. Juc says that he’s often caught off guard when he’s getting set for an important European game only to be flooded with texts from more than half of his front office who let him know that they’re also tuning in from Denver.

Many teams around the league don’t want to put in the effort that’s required to scout the continent effectively, but the Nuggets have reaped the rewards of the time and labor that they’ve dedicated to watching not only the top prospects that come out of Europe but also the lesser-known specialists who rise from the coasts of Slovenia or the Baltic states.

Juc is at the head of Denver’s extensive European ground operation.

“We like to joke in our group,” Juc said. “It doesn’t matter if the player is from Kansas or Kaunas (Lithuania) because at the end of the day he’s just a basketball player.”