101 Greats of European Basketball

The Czech
scoring machine
The roster of future stars coming from the
1970 junior EuroBasket in Athens was
not bad at all. Several great players came
from several teams. Alexander Belov and
Valery Miloserdov from the USSR, Luis
Miguel Santillana and Rafa Rullan from
Spain, Pierluigi Marzorati and Fabrizio Della Fiori from
Italy, Srecko Jaric and Goran Rakocevic (the fathers
of Marko Jaric and Igor Rakocevic) in Yugoslavia,
and Kamil Brabenec (Brno, December 4, 1951) from
Czechoslovakia.
There, in Athens, Brabenec averaged 16 points per
game in starting what would be a brilliant international
career. He was a natural scorer who, at the start of the
21st century, was chosen as the second best Czech
player of all time, behind only Jiri Zidek Sr. After Brabenec,
the list of Czech basketball greats also includes
Ivan Mrazek, Jiri Zednicek and Frantisek Konvicka.
Just a year after his breakout in Athens, Brabenec
was already playing with the senior national team at
the 1971 EuroBasket in Essen, Germany. In 1972, he
competed in the Munich Olympics, in 1973 it was the
EuroBasket in Barcelona, and in 1974 he made his debut
at the World Cup. Brabenec was at the forefront of
international basketball for nearly two full decades until
EuroBasket 1987 in Athens, the same city that saw him
take his first international steps. But that was only the
end of his career with the national team. He played at
the club level until 1995, when he hung up his shoes
at age 45. He left behind a record 11,029 points in the
national league, a record 403 games with the national
team, a EuroBasket silver medal from 1985 and a pair of
bronze medals from 1977 and 1981.
Brabenec was selected the domestic league player
of the year after the 1975-76 season and chosen to the
all-league team some 11 times. He also won six titles.
And all of this happened due to a childhood medical
prognosis that resulted in doctors not allowing him to
play his favorite sport, ice hockey. Luck would have it
that he then chose basketball.
Behind the numbers and the biographical data,
there’s the person and, in this case, a great player. He
was a natural scorer, a shooting guard by the book,
even if, at 1.90 meters, a little short by today’s standards.
But in his time, he was tall enough. Plus, with
his technique, speed and shot, he never had problems
overcoming taller defenders. He was a great player and
I agree with his very own words: “If I had played basketball
today, I would be playing in the NBA.”
In fact, he was not even far from that in his own time,
when the Detroit Pistons took an interest in him. He
even visited the club’s headquarters, but then he preferred
to go back to his native country because, during
the 1970s, signing for an NBA team meant renouncing
your spot on the national team, and that was a high
price that he did not want to pay.
If I am not mistaken, I saw Brabenec for the first time on
TV, during the 1972 Olympics in Munich, when Yugoslavia
defeated Czechoslovakia 66-63. The player I remember
the most was Zidek, who with his 18 points, drove Kresimir
Cosic, Vinko Jelovac, Zarko Knezevic and Milun Marovic
crazy around the court. Brabenec scored 4 points. One
year later, at the Barcelona EuroBasket, Yugoslavia defeated
Czechoslovakia on its way to the title, 91-76. Zidek (22
101 greats of european basketball
Kamil Brabenec
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