101 Greats of European Basketball

The record man
If a visiting team shoots 0-for-11 from the threepoint
arc, probably the last thing you’d expect is
that it won the game by 19 points, scoring a total
of 115. You’d probably expect even less that one of
this team’s players made history in a competition
by scoring... 63 points! That’s exactly what happened
on February 26, 1996 in a EuroLeague game in
Bologna between Kinder and Real Madrid.
The Spanish team won by 96-115, scoring 58 points
in the first half, 57 in the second. Power forward Joe Arlauckas
spent 39 minutes on court to score 63 points by
making 24 of 28 two-pointers and 15 of 18 free throws.
He also pulled 11 rebounds, dished 2 assists and had
4 steals for a total performance index rating over 80!
In the official stats sheet we are only missing the fouls
drawn figure, but if he shot 18 free throws, he received
at least 9 fouls, and he committed only 2. It was one
of those unforgettable nights of offensive fireworks,
even though both Pablo Laso and Jose Miguel Antunez
missed 3 attempts from the arc each (although Laso
finished with 9 assists), Ismael Santos missed 2, Santi
Abad, Zoran Savic and Arlauckas himself also missed 1
three apiece for Madrid’s 0-for-11 total.
With 63 points, Arlauckas is still far away from the
99 that Radivoj Korac scored in the same competition in
1965, but he is still way above the modern Turkish Airlines
EuroLeague record of 41 shared by Alphonso Ford,
Carlton Myers, Kaspars Kambala and Bobby Brown.
Great night in Bologna
“It was an incredible game,” Zoran Savic, the second-best
Real Madrid scorer in that game with 16 points,
remembers of that great night for Arlauckas. “Joe missed
one or two of his first attempts from the field, but after
that, he just scored everything. He played at ease and
nobody even realized that he had scored so many points.
We were all kind of surprised after the game, looking at
the stats sheet. Joe was a natural-born offensive player,
with a great four-meter jump shot and amazing timing
for both shooting and rebounds. He knew how to play
both facing the basket and with his back to it. He had
many resources on offense and was a great teammate.”
Of Lithuanian heritage, Joseph John “Joe” Arlauckas
was born on July 20, 1965, in Rochester, New
York. He had basketball running through his veins, but
baseball was his sport of choice in his youth. He played
basketball at Jefferson High School but in his first years
at Niagara University he didn’t think the sport would
become his profession. His last two seasons there
were pretty good (17.4 points), so his size (2.04 meters)
and his good fundamentals opened a door for him to
the 1987 NBA draft. The Sacramento Kings picked him
number 74 in the fourth round. He would share a locker
room with Otis Thorpe, Harold Pressley, Joe Kleine,
Ed Pinckney and Lasalle Thompson, all of them power
forwards or centers, his position. He even scored 17
points in one game, but that was not enough for him to
stay. He was released in December of 1987 after only
nine games, with 34 points and 13 rebounds total.
His new destination would be Europe. He joined
Snaidero Caserta of Italy, where he would fill in for
Georgi Glouchkov, the first European to ever play in
the NBA. There, he would coincide with a super scorer
like Oscar Schmidt and the great Italian prospect Ferdinando
Gentile. In the Italian Cup final, against Varese,
Arlauckas won his first title. Caserta won by 113-100
Joe Arlauckas
101 greats of european basketball
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