Serbia’s second-best basketball player had a red carpet to the rim, an opportunity to steal a series-altering rebound from Serbia’s best basketball player.

But to succeed in his heist, Bogdan Bogdanovic sensed he would need to take a different path to the ball. Around the red carpet.

He knew Nikola Jokic too well.

“I’m always trying to win against him,” the Clippers guard told The Denver Post. “That’s what you have to write.”

The play in question was a pivotal moment in Denver’s first-round series that ended up mercifully overshadowed by Aaron Gordon’s buzzer-beating dunk 75 seconds later. It was also a spotlight on one subplot of the series — two countrymen and friends facing off in the NBA Playoffs for the first time.

With 1:15 to play in Game 4 and Los Angeles trailing by one, Kawhi Leonard launched a 3-pointer from the right wing. Bogdanovic was stationed on the opposite side, unguarded because Michael Porter Jr. was helping off of him to put another weak-side body on Clippers center Ivica Zubac. When the shot went up, Zubac boxed out Porter on the left block. Jokic was alone in the middle of the paint. He had first dibs on the rebound.

But the space to Jokic’s left, between him and Zubac, was inviting Bogdanovic to occupy it. He had a free lane to crash the glass, a straight-line sprint to lodge himself on the inside of Jokic’s hip.

Instead, Bogdanovic tried to think like Jokic — to anticipate the opponent’s next move. It’s easier when the opponent is often a teammate.

“Honestly, I’ve learned from him that his place (on the floor), where he’s moving, he knows how to space himself for a good rebound,” Bogdanovic explained. “So that play, I knew I had an open middle. But I went on his right-hand (side), because I saw Zu on the left side.

“I’m thinking a thousand thoughts in a second, but that was that thought. I was like, ‘Uh, let’s go left, right, left, right — right!”

Bogdanovic nailed it. Jokic shuffled to his left to leverage the open space on his right, and Bogdanovic took the long way around the outside of the rotund 7-footer, surprising him and seizing the rebound. With a reverse put-back layup, the 6-5 guard gave Los Angeles a 97-96 lead, completing an unthinkable 32-9 run.

“We lost the game,” Bogdanovic said, “so I couldn’t (trash)-talk.”

Jokic and Bogdanovic were the glue that held the Serbian national team together last summer during a bronze-medal run at the Paris Olympics. Bogdanovic was the captain, Jokic the indispensable hub of offense. They both averaged more than 18 points per game. They stayed up until 6 a.m. together after their heartbreaking semifinal loss to Team USA, hanging out in the treatment room of their team hotel with a handful of other players.

“Talking a little about the game, and then talking about life,” Bogdanovic told The Post last fall. “Order a couple of beers. Maybe a bottle of wine. And talk. … Being there with friends, it helps you go through these moments. That’s what we believe.”

Needless to say, this is different. Jokic and Bogdanovic have spent most of their NBA careers in opposite conferences, playing against each other only twice per season in a lower-stakes environment since 2020. Annual trips to Atlanta for the Nuggets were opportunities to catch up with a friend the night before a game for Jokic.

Playoff basketball is more tense, more ruthlessly competitive. The Hawks traded Bogdanovic to Los Angeles in February, making this first-round alignment of the Serbian stars possible. “We talk during the season,” Bogdanovic said. “We are trying to be pros now.”

He shot 42.7% from 3-point range in 30 games with the Clippers to finish the regular season, averaging 11.4 points, three rebounds and three assists off the bench. After a slow start to this series, he was a plus-22 in Game 4 and an 18-point scorer in Game 5.

As for Jokic, it’s been a pass-first kind of series, due to the crowds Los Angeles has shown him.

But he has always preferred it that way. Bogdanovic knows better than anyone. The first time they ever played against each other in 2013, Bogdanovic was an emerging star for the Belgrade-based EuroLeague team Partizan, and Jokic was playing for Mega Basket, a smaller developmental club in Serbia. “He was supposed to come to Partizan to play with us,” Bogdanovic recalled, “but he stayed on Mega because he had a bigger role.”

Even so, Jokic wasn’t a known entity as an NBA prospect yet, so opponents like Bogdanovic had no reason to double-team him from the perimeter.

It didn’t matter.

“We played in preparation games twice, and we played in-season twice. I didn’t like him,” Bogdanovic told The Post this week, laughing. “Because he was goofy, and he wasn’t hitting shots. He was just passing. … He could have scored one-on-one and everything. He was toying with (the game). That’s a good word. He was like toying, joking with it.”