101 Greats of European Basketball

he played another Korac Cup final against another Italian
team, Olimpia Milano, but this time Radja and his teammates
could not succeed despite his two good games,
especially in Rome (30 points, 11 rebounds). On the other
side there was Djordjevic, who had 29 points in Rome
in Game 1 and then 38 points in Milan.
In 1992, Radja fulfilled one of his dreams, playing
with Croatia in the Barcelona Olympics, winning the silver
medal after losing in the final to the real USA Dream
Team. It was a great Croatian team with Petrovic, Kukoc,
Perasovic, Danko Cvjeticanin and Stojan Vrankovic,
among others. Radja averaged 18 points and 6.9 rebounds,
and he scored 23 points in the final.
The next three years, Radja would win bronze medals
with Croatia at the EuroBaskets of 1993 in Germany (17.1
points) and 1995 in Greece (13.9 points and 5.7 rebounds),
and also at the 1994 World Cup in Toronto (22.4 points
and 8.5 rebounds). He also played at the 1996 Olympics
in Atlanta and the 1999 EuroBasket in France but could
not come home with any hardware from those events.
Radja finally played with the Boston Celtics between
1993 and 1997. In his first season, Radja averaged 15.1
points and 7.2 boards, enough for him to make the
all-rookie second team. He totaled 224 games with 16.7
points and 8.4 rebounds in the NBA. In the summer of
1997, he was traded to the Philadelphia 76ers, but the
doctors there doubted that his knees could take four
games per week, so nobody opposed it when Radja
asked to come back to Europe. His new destination was
Greece, where he joined Panathinaikos, the team that
had won its first EuroLeague title the previous season
with his old coach, Boza Maljkovic. But by the time Radja
got there, Maljkovic had already left. He played two years
with the Greens and won two Greek Leagues. For the
1999-2000 season, he was back to the Dalmatian coast,
not with KK Split (the former Jugoplastika), but rather
with KK Zadar, whom he helped win the Croatian League.
The first basket in the new EuroLeague
The following year Radja was back in Greece, but this
time he signed for Olympiacos. In the opening game
of the new EuroLeague on October 16, 2000, against
Real Madrid, Dino Radja became the player to score the
first basket in the new competition organized by the
clubs themselves and the ULEB. Real Madrid won 75-
73 and Radja finished the game with 13 points and 17
rebounds against a Real Madrid that included Jiri Zidek,
Sasha Djordjevic, Raul Lopez, Marko Milic, Eric Struelens
and Alberto Angulo. It was a historic game with a
historic shot by Radja.
After a year in Olympiacos, Radja was back in Croatia
and during a brief period of the 2001-02 season and
played with Cibona. But he played his final season with
Split and helped a lot, too, as the team won the Croatian
League with the help of Zdovc and Josip Sesar for Petar
Skansi on the bench. With the win, Split broke Cibona’s
streak of 11 consecutive titles. Radja celebrated by
smoking a cigar “Red Auerbach-style”.
It was the perfect moment to retire. Radja was 36
years old, had won almost everything, and had come
full circle back to Split. He had also fulfilled almost all his
dreams. It was time to start a different career. For more
than 10 years, Radja served as president of KK Split.
During that time, Radja was honored among the 50
Greatest EuroLeague Contributors to the first-half-century
of European club competitions at a ceremony organized
by Euroleague Basketball for the 2008 Final Four
in Madrid. In 2018, Radja became the eighth European
player ever to be chosen for induction into the Naismith
Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
101 greats of european basketball
Dino Radja
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