101 Greats of European Basketball

A diamond
on the court
For many years, the great duo in the Greek national
team that won the 2005 EuroBasket
was formed by Vassilis Spanoulis and Dimitris
Diamantidis. They also played together
for Panathinaikos Athens before Spanoulis
would end up with arch-rival Olympiacos
Piraeus. Both are symbols for Greek basketball and
icons in the sports capital of Athens, but not everyone
knows that neither of them is from that city.
Spanoulis started playing in Larissa, a town between
Athens and Thessaloniki, while Diamantidis took
his first basketball steps at 14 years old in Kastoria, located
in the north of the Macedonian region of Greece,
prior to signing, five years later, for Iraklis Thessaloniki.
The key moment for Diamantidis was the EuroBasket
won by Greece in 1987. Funny enough, his idols were
not Nikos Galis nor Panagiotis Giannakis, the two big
aces of Greek basketball back then. He explained that
at the beginning he had no idols, but later he liked Fanis
Christodoulou a lot “because he could do many things.”
The home of his parents Maria and Tomas, in Kastoria,
was right next to a school that had a basketball
court where a young Diamantidis spent days and nights
practicing, even in the summer, when he needed to ask
for the keys so that he could open the locked doors to
get on the court. In 1999-2000 he signed for Iraklis at
age 19. His club of origin, Kastoria, would later put his
name on its arena. Diamantidis stayed in Iraklis, where
he started with humble numbers (1.8 points in only 9
games played), until 2004. Those numbers truly hid the
future star: 16 points in 9 games, only 29.4% accuracy
on two-point shots, 0-for-3 in triples, and just 6 assists.
More than one person said he would be a mediocre
player.
After five seasons in Iraklis, he moved left Thessaloniki
with vastly different numbers: 14.8 points, 51.9%
in two-point shots, 33.3% in threes, 6.3 rebounds and
1.4 assists. He also earned 2003-04 MVP honor in
Greece. In the 2004 Mediterranean Games, he made
his debut with the national team. Watching at a distance
was the Panathinaikos head coach at the time,
Zeljko Obradovic, who signed him for the next season.
In an interview with Frank Lawlor for EuroLeague.
net in 2011, Diamantidis explained the changes he went
through when he joined Panathinaikos:
“When I was young, I watched basketball because I
liked it. I didn’t follow any particular players. When you
are so young, you cannot understand some elements
of the game, how the game is really played. You watch
the game and you simply enjoy watching it. I believe
that I picked up more elements of my game from my
coaches and not from other players. When I first came
to Panathinaikos, my coaches showed me that basketball
can be played in a different way than the one I knew
until then. They showed me that there are other things
that can be done and showed me the way to do them. I
saw a different kind of basketball, which I liked.”
Obradovic took notice of his defensive skills more
than his talents on offense. In his first season with the
Greens, Diamantidis improved his percentages (59.3%
twos, 35.8% threes), doubled his average in assists,
and also performed great invisible jobs not always seen
in the statistics.
The best opposing scorers had real nightmares when
101 greats of european basketball
Dimitris Diamantidis
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