For more than a decade, Nikola Jokić has been the punchline to one of the internet’s strangest NBA origin stories: a future MVP, drafted in the second round, introduced to America not through a highlight reel or a handshake on stage, but through a Taco Bell commercial.
The moment has lived in sports folklore since the 2014 NBA Draft, when Jokić was selected 41st overall and the broadcast cut to a Quesarito ad at the exact wrong time, turning his name into a footnote beneath melted cheese and marketing copy. In the years that followed, Jokić leaned into it with the dry humor that makes him such an unlikely superstar brand, at various points saying he’d never eaten Taco Bell, and treating the whole thing like a personal grudge performed as a bit.
Nikola Jokic Reveals He’s Never Eaten Taco Bell Because Of 2015 NBA Draft pic.twitter.com/G59Z00Sji9
— OpenCourt-Basketball (@OpenCourtFB) February 24, 2025
Then Taco Bell brought the joke back to life on purpose.
In December 2025, the company announced the return of the Quesarito for a limited run, framing it as both a fan-service comeback and a playful attempt to “win over” the one guy most associated with it.
This week, a clip circulated showing Jokić in a Nuggets locker room doing the one thing the meme insisted would never happen: eating a Quesarito. The viral framing was simple, Jokić, finally trying the item that stole his draft-night spotlight, while social posts tied the video to Shams Charania and flagged it as branded content with a partner tag.
Shams’ really caught Nikola Jokić finally eating the Quesarito in the locker room 😂😂😂😂 @tacobell #TacoBellPartner pic.twitter.com/pMDfNIDrRY
— NBACentral (@TheDunkCentral) January 16, 2026
In other words: the “boycott,” always more comedic than ideological, ended exactly the way modern sports culture ends everything, on camera, in a shareable clip, with the brand’s wink plainly visible.
If that sounds like a marketing victory lap, it is. But it’s also a strangely fitting Jokić story. This is a player who has built a global reputation by rejecting the usual superstar behavior: no performative outrage, no forced gravitas, no obsession with narrative control. He tends to treat the outside world like weather, something that exists, something you can’t change, something you certainly don’t need to argue with. That’s why the Quesarito joke worked for so long. It wasn’t a controversy; it was a tiny, absurd parallel universe where the league’s most dominant player carried a soft grudge against fast food because of one poorly timed broadcast cut.
And Taco Bell understood the real leverage point: not offense, not apology, but playfulness. The brand didn’t try to make Jokić a spokesman for lifestyle aspiration. It tried to make him the star of a long-running punchline, one that sports fans already knew by heart.
