101 Greats of European Basketball

Vladimir Stankovic
That same season, playing with Lithuania in the 1995
EuroBasket qualifiers, Karnisovas averaged 24.5 points, 6
rebounds and 4 assists. A star was born. In the 1995 EuroBasket
in Athens, where Lithuania won the silver after
falling to Yugoslavia in the final (96-90) in an unforgettable
game, Karnisovas averaged 19.8 points, 5.1 rebounds
and 2.1 assists. He was his team’s third-best scorer
behind Sabonis (23.7) and Marciulionis (22.0). All the big
teams in Europe tried to sign him, but Barcelona was
fastest. On July 3, one day after the Athens final, the Catalan
club announced the signing. In the summer of 1995,
then, Karnisovas returned to the city where he was first
noticed, three years earlier. His debut was exceptional: 30
points on 7 of 8 three-point shooting. His coach then, Aito
Garcia Reneses, remembered Karnisovas in this way:
“Arturas was very fast, ran the fastbreak well and penetrated
well from both sides. He was also a good shooter
and correct in everything else. I remember his first game
with Barcelona in Vitoria, in the opening game of the
Spanish League, where he left everybody watching in
awe. After that, his game was hurt by the tendency of the
refs to call him for traveling, especially on breakaways.”
Two lost finals
In his first season with Barcelona, Karnisovas won
the Spanish League while averaging 20.9 points, but
the big goal of the club was winning, at last, the Euro-
League. Barcelona reached the Final Four in Paris with
ambition, boosted by having defeated the Real Madrid
of Zeljko Obradovic in the semifinals 76-66 after trailing
by 4 points at the break. The man of the comeback was
Karnisovas, who netted 24 points and pulled down 6
rebounds in 36 minutes. In the final, the rival was Panathinaikos,
coached by Boza Maljkovic, the former coach
of Barcelona. The game ended with a 67-66 win for the
Greens, but with great controversy. The Catalans still
consider that the title was stolen from them due to an
illegal block by Stojko Vrankovic on Jose Montero when,
in the last seconds, he was running alone to the basket
for a bucket that was worth a title. I saw the game live
and I think the same now as I did then: the block was
illegal. But the whole play itself was also illegal because
the official clock was stuck at 5.4 seconds. Why the clock
had stopped is another story, unforgivable in such a big
game, but that’s the way it happened. Dominique Wilkins
was the MVP, but there is no doubt that if Barca had won,
the MVP would have been Karnisovas, who netted 23
points plus 8 rebounds and 6 assists in 38 minutes.
The spring of that season I had the pleasure of telling
Karnisovas that he had been elected MVP of the
season by FIBA Basketball, the official magazine those
days for the international organization. He gave me a
good interview for that magazine. Since then, we have
had a very good relationship.
In the summer of 1996, Arturas won his second Olympic
bronze with Lithuania, this time in Atlanta. His contribution
was 16.3 points and 5.1 rebounds as he was the
second-best scorer of the team, after Sabonis (16.9).
Midway through the 1996-97 season, Barcelona
inked Sasha Djordjevic and together he and Karnisovas
formed one of the best foreign duos ever seen in European
basketball. The two players, previously rivals with
their former clubs and especially national teams, established
an excellent relationship. On the court, they just
understood each other and in private they had a good
friendship. Barcelona reached the Rome Final Four with
no problems. In the semis, the team defeated ASVEL
Villeurbanne 77-70 with 17 points from Djordjevic, 16 by
Jimenez and 9 by Karnisovas. Olympiacos awaited in the
final, but Barcelona experienced another Greek tragedy.
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