Nada Stepovich is the wife of NBA Hall of Famer John Stockton and the daughter of Mike Stepovich, Alaska’s last territorial governor before statehood. She married the Utah Jazz point guard in 1986, raised six children in Spokane, Washington, and has kept a genuinely private life for close to four decades. Most published coverage stops at those two sentences. The actual story has considerably more to it.
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Nada Stepovich: Quick Facts
| Full Name | Nada Stepovich |
| Known For | Wife of NBA Hall of Famer John Stockton |
| Father | Mike Stepovich, last Territorial Governor of Alaska |
| Mother | Matilda Baricevic Stepovich (died November 25, 2003) |
| Siblings | One of 13 children |
| Married | John Stockton, 1986 |
| Children | Six: Houston, Michael, David, Lindsay, Laura, Samuel |
| Residence | Spokane, Washington |
| Religion | Roman Catholic |
| Heritage | Montenegrin and Croatian descent (paternal line) |
Her Father Was Part of American Political History
Before Nada Stepovich ever set foot on the Gonzaga University athletics roster, she was already part of one of Alaska’s most consequential political families.
Her father, Michael Anthony “Mike” Stepovich, was appointed Territorial Governor of Alaska by President Dwight D. Eisenhower on May 9, 1957, taking office on June 5. He was the first Alaska-born person to hold the post in a non-acting capacity. His single overriding mission during his governorship was Alaska statehood, and he pursued it publicly and without pause. He traveled across the continental United States delivering speeches, sat for press interviews, appeared on the TV program What’s My Line, and was featured on the cover of Time magazine in 1958, standing before a totem pole, making the case to the American public that Alaska belonged in the Union.
When Eisenhower signed the Alaskan Statehood Bill on July 7, 1958, Mike Stepovich was among the figures most responsible for that outcome. He resigned the governorship on August 1, 1958, to run for one of Alaska’s first U.S. Senate seats, lost to Ernest Gruening, and ran twice more for Alaska governor, in 1962 and 1966, losing both times. He returned to his Fairbanks law practice and relocated to Medford, Oregon in 1978, though he kept his legal residency in Alaska.
Mike Stepovich died on February 14, 2014, at age 94, after a fall while visiting his son Jim in San Diego. All 13 of his children traveled to be at his bedside before he passed. At the time of his death, he was the last surviving American governor who had left office in the 1950s. A sitting U.S. Senator eulogized him on the Senate floor.
He married Matilda Baricevic in November 1947. She died on November 25, 2003. The Congressional Record names all 13 of their children: Antonia, Maria Theresa, Michael, Peter, Christopher, Dominic, Theodore John, Nicholas Vincent, James, Laura, Nada, Andrea, and Melissa.
The Stepovich family’s roots run further back than Alaska. Mike’s father, known locally as “Wise Mike” Stepovich, emigrated from Montenegro to the Alaska goldfields during the Gold Rush era. His mother, Olga, was from Sutivan, on the Croatian island of Braฤ. Nada’s first cousin is Nicole Burdette, the actress and playwright known for her work in The Sopranos.
Nada Stepovich Was a Gonzaga Athlete
This is the detail most articles on Nada Stepovich have consistently missed or glossed over.
Nada Stepovich was a college athlete at Gonzaga University, competing in both volleyball and track. The Salt Lake Tribune confirmed this directly in a 2013 feature on the Stockton family, identifying her as “the ex-Gonzaga volleyball player.” The same detail surfaced in 2020 when her daughter Laura, in an Associated Press interview, spoke about where the family’s competitive drive came from:
“Her mother, Nada, who is a former volleyball player, is also ‘super tough and she doesn’t get the credit that she probably deserves.'”
Laura Stockton, Associated Press, 2020
She competed at a Division I university, in the same athletic program where the man she would marry was becoming one of the most efficient point guards college basketball had seen. That background is not a minor footnote. It is the context most published profiles of Nada Stepovich have simply not reported.
From Gonzaga to a 40-Year Marriage
Nada Stepovich and John Stockton met during his Gonzaga playing years, between 1980 and 1984. A 2003 Deseret News long-form feature on Stockton’s career places her as his girlfriend during that period. In one anecdote from a Gonzaga teammate, Stockton walked directly toward the gym after a game while Nada “was probably wondering” where he had gone. It is a story that circulates because it says something about Stockton’s obsessive work ethic, but it also places Nada in his life from his earliest competitive years, long before the NBA.
They married in 1986, two years into Stockton’s career with the Utah Jazz. He had been drafted 16th overall in the 1984 NBA Draft and would go on to play all 19 of his professional seasons in Utah. The family home, though, stayed in Spokane. A 2024 federal court filing by Stockton described him as a “life-long Spokane resident” who noted that apart from his annual relocation to Utah for the season, he had spent his entire life in the city.
That decision anchored how the Stockton family was built.
The Stockton Children: A Family That Plays
Nada and John Stockton have six children. Five of them pursued competitive sports.
| Child | Athletic Career |
|---|---|
| Houston | College football, defensive back, University of Montana Grizzlies |
| Michael | Professional basketball in Germany (BG Karlsruhe, BG Gรถttingen) and France |
| David | Gonzaga University; NBA with Sacramento Kings and Utah Jazz; G League |
| Lindsay | Montana State University basketball; played professionally in Weiterstadt, Germany (2016) |
| Laura | Gonzaga University (459 career assists); German Cup winner with TK Hannover Luchse (2023, 2024); currently Norrkรถping Dolphins, Sweden |
| Samuel | Private life |
Laura Stockton is the most recently active of the six. Through 23 games of the 2024-25 season with Norrkรถping Dolphins in Sweden’s Damligan, she averaged 16.6 points, 5.0 assists, and 1.9 steals per game. She tore her ACL in the 2019 West Coast Conference tournament during her senior year at Gonzaga, where she had accumulated 459 career assists and earned All-West Coast Conference First Team honors. She rebuilt her career entirely, winning back-to-back German Cups in 2023 and 2024 before moving to Sweden.
What John Stockton Said at the Hall of Fame
On September 11, 2009, John Stockton was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, alongside Michael Jordan, David Robinson, and Jerry Sloan. His speech made no mention of career assists, career steals, All-Star selections, or Olympic gold medals. It was entirely about the people who shaped him.
When he reached Nada, he said:
“They say that a good man needs a good woman behind him, but I’m not sure I want my wife Nada behind me. My peripheral vision isn’t that good and she has great aim. She stood beside me for 23 years and her dad Mike Stepovich and a large part of her 15-person family is out there as well to support me tonight, but she was my best decision. I always knew that when I left for a road trip I could shut the door behind me and go to work because I knew everything at home would be taken care of. Thank you Nada for being there.”
– John Stockton, Hall of Fame Induction Speech, September 11, 2009
For a man who spent two decades giving the briefest answers in post-game press conferences, that passage is among the most direct things he has said publicly about his personal life.
The Priest Lake Property Dispute
In April 2019, John Stockton and his lake cabin neighbor Todd Brinkmeyer were ordered to pay approximately $494,000 in attorney’s fees by Idaho District Judge Barbara Buchanan. The case involved their attempt to block the sale and construction of 65 acres of undeveloped wetlands on the south end of Priest Lake, Idaho, to developer Tricore Investments.
The dispute had started in July 2015, when the Warren family agreed to sell two parcels totaling 45 acres to Tricore for $2 million. Judge Buchanan found that Stockton, Brinkmeyer, and members of the Warren family had engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with the contracted sale, and ordered the land sold to Tricore at a loss. Tricore successfully argued violations of the Idaho Consumer Protection Act, which triggered the right to attorney’s fees. The Idaho Supreme Court upheld the ruling in 2021.
Nada Stepovich was not named in the case.
The Record She Has Built by Staying Out of It
Nada Stepovich has no public social media accounts. She has not given media interviews. Her professional work outside of her Gonzaga athletics career has never been publicly documented, and there is no credible source that verifies the “businesswoman” label some websites have attached to her name.
What the record does show: a woman whose family name was written into Alaska’s history before she was old enough to vote, who competed as a college athlete at Gonzaga while the man she would spend her life with was training in the same sports complex, and who kept a family of eight grounded in one city through 19 seasons of NBA life, six competitive children, and the specific pressures that follow a Hall of Fame career.
Her daughter said she doesn’t get the credit she deserves. Her husband used his highest public moment to call her his best decision. Her father was eulogized on the United States Senate floor.
John Stockton’s wife Nada Stepovich has spent four decades staying out of the story. The story itself is worth reading.
Reporting sourced from the Salt Lake Tribune, Deseret News, Associated Press, KSL, Spokesman-Review, Seattle Times, Anchorage Daily News, Wikipedia, and the U.S. Congressional Record.
