When he was 26, Teodosic was courted hard in free agency by the Memphis Grizzlies. He came close to accepting their offer in the summer of 2013, only to decide he couldn’t bear to leave for the United States until he won a Euroleague title. He never expected that it would take another three years, but his European critics were finally hushed when Teodosic led CSKA Moscow to the second-most prestigious club basketball championship in the world in 2016.

The expiration of his second three-year CSKA contract after the 2016-17 season then set him up, at last, to make the leap to sample N.B.A. life and try to quiet the critics on both sides of the Atlantic who would have branded his résumé incomplete without a stint on U.S. shores.

Teodosic said it felt “weird” to be branded a rookie, after winning Euroleague Most Valuable Player honors as far back as 2010 and unexpectedly steering Serbia into the gold medal game against the mighty United States at both the 2014 FIBA World Cup and the 2016 Rio Olympics. “But I am happy they don’t treat me like a rookie,” Teodosic said of his fellow Clippers.

That means no fetching bagels or doughnuts to bring to practice. No transporting of the veterans’ luggage or singing on teammates’ birthdays with the other first-year players. He arrived with too much hoopla to be assigned rookie chores, especially when, as Dekker put it, Teodosic “knows the game better than most of us.”

“I will feel sorry if I didn’t come here,” Teodosic said, admitting that he, too, felt something was missing in his career without an N.B.A. adventure. “I want to show myself I can play here with all these guys. I just feel sorry that I didn’t win Euroleague earlier and came here earlier.”

Yet he’s the first to say that they are largely two different games. In Europe, Teodosic capitalized on the smaller court, shorter games and lighter schedule, relying on his pick-and-roll guile to deal with all the bodies in the paint. In the N.B.A., there is more space to cover, far more nuance in the defensive assignments and, most crucially, less time to get shots off.