The well-traveled Veljko Paunovic is a man who seems to have friends wherever he goes, and the city he now calls home is no different.
On Monday night, Paunovic connected with Chicago Bulls forward Nikola Mirotic, whose travels mirror those of the first-year Chicago Fire head coach. The encounter came courtside at the United Center prior to the Bulls tilt with the Miami Heat.
The 38-year-old Paunovic was born in present-day Macedonia while the 24-year-old Mirotic has his roots in Montenegro, but their respective athletic careers took both to the Spanish capital of Madrid. That's where Paunovic spent much of his professional club career and where he continued to make his home before moving to the Chicago Fire in November. Mirotic, meanwhile, starred for both the Real Madrid junior and senior-level squads in Liga ACB until making the jump to the NBA and the Windy City in 2014.
The two were acquaintances in Madrid and reconnected Monday at the UC, exchanging a Chicago Fire scarf and a Bulls jersey with one another. Check out a few tweets from the encounter below and click the video at the top of the page to watch CSN Chicago reporter Chuck Garfien chat with Paunovic about his ties to Mirotic and the start of the 2016 Chicago Fire campaign.
Mirotic finished the game with an efficient 15 points on 6-of-11 shooting with eight rebounds. But alas, a definitive answer to the question of the 6-foot-10 big man's soccer skills, it seems, will need to come another day...
