Speaking his language

New Laker Bogut able to teach Zubac to play center like a veteran in his native Croatian.

Sometimes Andrew Bogut might mix up his sentence structure or use the wrong pronoun when he speaks Croatian. He gets his point across, but it’s not his primary language. He grew up in Australia learning it informally, the way the children of immigrants often learn their parents’ native tongue.

Ivica Zubac is willing to let that go.

“I have somebody who understands me, finally,” Zubac said.

An understated joke with a morsel of truth.

While Zubac’s English is excellent, last season he was a teenager thousands of miles from home, with only his girlfriend here to share the language. Occasionally he’d meet a Croatian family excited by the Lakers’ new Croatian center.

Bogut’s addition gave Zubac the ability to feel at home while at work. Though Bogut’s an Australian national, his parents are Croatian. He spends his summers on the glamorous island of Pag, about 200 miles north of Zubac’s hometown of Citluk in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Entering his 13th NBA season, Bogut has a lot to teach Zubac, who is entering his second. That he can do it in the 20-year-old’s native language helps, too.

“He’s a young fellow; he’s in a big country in a big city in L.A.,” Bogut said. “I think it’s cool to have another ear for him to talk to that kind of can relate to him a little bit more. His English is very good but sometimes he might not understand things as well as he would like, and sometimes when you hear it in your own native tongue it kind of clicks in a little more.”

Zubac became the Lakers’ starting center last March, but it didn’t come with much pressure.

“Nobody expected anything from me,” Zubac said. “I only played second part of the season where we knew … the score is not important. And now to play, hopefully, when we are trying to get wins, it means a lot. Everybody is expecting a lot from me because I proved [to] everybody last season I can play.”

Zubac started 11 games and averaged 10.6 points and 5.3 rebounds. Having played well, he went into the Las Vegas Summer League confident, but surprisingly looked lost. He couldn’t keep up with the pace of those games and left disappointed with himself.

“He seemed off,” Lakers coach Luke Walton said. “We weren’t quite sure what it was. … He just didn’t seem to have that same hunger that he was playing with during the season. What that was I wasn’t sure, but we were going to work with him to figure it out.”

Walton sat down with Zubac after summer league to talk to him about what went wrong. He noted that complacency in the summer, when facing young players who are hungry to earn jobs, makes success elusive.

They also knew Zubac needed to lose weight — a lot of it.

So Zubac set to work cutting unhealthy foods out of his diet and working out religiously. He dropped his body fat percentage, from 19% at certain points last season, all the way down to 8% now. “Eight Percent” has become a nickname around the Lakers facility.

And when training camp opened, the Lakers got him two new mentors who have a lot to offer him. They added Brook Lopez, a former AllStar center who likely will start this year, in the trade that sent D’Angelo Russell and Timofey Mozgov to the Brooklyn Nets. And Bogut, an NBA champion who can teach Zubac from his more than a decade of experience playing center in the NBA, and do it in Croatian.

“I can understand whatever [the coaches] say, but sometimes it’s much easier, like some tiny details, to hear in Croatian,” Zubac said. “Like I said, he’s one of the best defensive centers and he plays my position, so every practice he is showing me something new and he’s been great.”

Said Bogut, whose work visa cleared over the weekend, allowing him to join the team for practice Saturday: “Just some little tips in the post. There’s certain little things that veterans pick up over 13 years in the NBA that I try to show him especially defensively, where he can get away with little things. Just show him that and how to use his body and be physical and be big. We need him when he’s in there to protect the basket for us and be as physical as he can.”

Although Zubac acknowledges Bogut’s grammar isn’t always perfect, he gives Bogut’s Croatian a nine out of 10.

Said Bogut: “That’s very surprising because I wouldn’t have rated it that. My grammar’s horrible. I never grew up learning it. Just learned it in my family. A nine’s sensational.”

It might just be the excitement that comes with familiarity. Bogut offers something to Zubac no one else in the Lakers organization can.