When you're 6-foot-10 and a rookie on the rise, it's impossible to go unrecognized as you walk around a city that is falling in love with its NBA team all over again.
"Yeah, the people recognize you," 76ers forward Dario Saric said before a recent game at the Wells Fargo Center. "They say, 'How are you?' and other things that offer good support."
Like trust the process?
"Yeah, I get that a lot," Saric said. "That's the main sentence here."
A native of Croatia, Saric produces sentence structures in English that are often awkward. But he understands the language just fine and his basketball IQ is off the charts. You can tell by his playful interaction with his teammates that the 22-year-old has no regrets about coming to the United States after playing his first two professional seasons in Istanbul, Turkey.
During training camp, Saric said he did not think he was ready mentally to come to the NBA immediately after the Sixers acquired him in a 2014 draft trade with Orlando. He was not ready to handle life situations, let alone the daily rigors of going against grown men who tend to feast on players in their late teens and early 20s.
Now, in his rookie season, it is obvious that he can hold his own even if his performances are sometimes uneven.
"Of course I feel like I am ready," Saric said. "I've had a couple of good games and every basketball player has bad games, which is normal. I think I've been OK. I've played pretty well. Of course you can always do better _ make more shots, make more layups."
It could be argued that Saric has been the second-best rookie in the NBA this season behind his teammate Joel Embiid. He entered play Thursday night in San Antonio averaging 9.9 points and 5.8 rebounds per game. Both figures ranked second behind Embiid among the league's rookies. Saric has played 18 more games than Embiid.
"It's all a learning process," said Ersan Ilyasova, the veteran forward who replaced Saric in the Sixers' starting lineup after being acquired from Oklahoma City earlier this season. "I remember myself that it wasn't easy. You come from a different country and it's way different basketball. But the way Dario plays, you can't even call him a rookie because he was playing at a high level for many years. But you still have to make adjustments and you try to help him out. It's a process and he's getting there."
Adjusting to life in the big city has not been that difficult for Saric because he seriously downsized when he moved from Istanbul to Philadelphia. Turkey's most populated city is the eighth largest in the world while Philadelphia does not even rank in the top 100.
"It's nice," Saric said. "It's a little bit smaller than Istanbul, but the fans are ready to wake up here. At least that's what I heard because I wasn't here the last two years. But what I heard is that the fans are ready to wake up because they see something. They see this team can do good things. And the city of Philadelphia is a good city. I like it. Downtown you have nice restaurants and there are things to do in your free time, which is very short because you have a lot of games."
The fans in attendance Monday night at the Wells Fargo Center when the Sixers rallied to beat the Sacramento Kings saw one of Saric's best games. He scored 17 points on 8-of-11 shooting, grabbed five rebounds and dished six assists. He also made two extraordinary passes that would have drawn a smile from his idol, Magic Johnson.
Ilyasova, whose locker sits next to Saric's, said that one of his rookie teammate's weaknesses right now is his inability to forget a bad play or bad game.
"In the NBA, you can't get frustrated by one game because there are a lot of games," Ilyasova said. "You can learn something from the last game and then you have to move on. He always holds a grudge about himself when he misses layups and stuff, but I think he's going to be really great."
Sixers coach Brett Brown agrees that Saric is too easily frustrated, but he also believes greatness is achievable for the 22-year-old whose father Predrag was once a teammate of the late Drazen Petrovic, one of the best NBA players to ever come out of Croatia.
"You see his facial expressions and he gets so into the game and he gets so upset at himself," Brown said. "He wants to make every play and he wants to make every shot. I think the frustration sometimes gets to him and playing the next play and letting stuff go is a challenge in his young stages of NBA navigation."
Brown can accept that right now because he sees so much more.
"If he is anything, he is tough and if he is anything he is highly competitive and I think we're seeing the versatility of a skill package ... that makes him quite unique in regards to a team," Brown said. "I can see easily how he fits into a team."
It's impossible not to see that just like it's impossible for Dario Saric to go unnoticed when he is walking around a city that is embracing him and its basketball team again.
