101 Greats of European Basketball

Corbalan, Rullan, Wayne Brabender, Carmelo Cabrera,
Vicente Ramos, Walter Szczerbiak and John Coughran.
Madrid won 119-102 and the game was officiated by
Obrad Belosevic (father of current EuroLeague official
Ilija) and Piet Leegwater. Luyk scored his last 2 points,
but Brabender (32) and Szczerbiak (28) shined against
the European team; Brabenec scored just 2 points.
During the autumn of that year, most of those players
participated in the World Cup in the Philippines, where Brabenec
(26.9 points per game) was the top scorer. Against
Puerto Rico, he scored 44, against China, 41. The championship
was a festival of great scorers: Oscar Schmidt,
Dalipagic, Kicanovic, Marcel de Souza... Czechoslovakia
placed fourth at the 1979 EuroBasket in Italy and lost the
bronze to Yugoslavia despite Brabenec’s 28 points. The
following year, at the Moscow Olympics, he averaged 17.6
points, but only good enough to share 10th place among
top scorers. The second bronze medal came at home in
Prague, at the next EuroBasket. In the third-place game
against Spain, Brabenec netted 28 points and Stanislav
Kropilak helped with 25 for the win. Against Italy earlier in
the tourney, Brabenec had scored 40.
Silver in Stuttgart
At 34 years of age, Brabenec, then playing for BC
Brno, didn’t even think about retiring. Despite being the
oldest player on the team (14 years older than Leos Krejci
and 12 more than Otto Maticky) he was its best player
and top scorer (17.9 ppg.). Yugoslavia went to the 1985
EuroBasket with the idea of regaining the supremacy
lost in Nantes two years before, but in the quarterfinals
the team clashed against a great Czechoslovakia and
a great Brabenec, who netted 32 of 102 points for his
team. Aside from being the top scorer, Brabenec was key
on defense. Drazen Petrovic, already a star, scored 25
points, but in the first half, when Czechoslovakia managed
to run away, 51-34, he had only 6. The winners were
congratulated by the Spaniards, as they thought they
would defeat Czechoslovakia easier than Yugoslavia, but
Brabenec and company also defeated Spain, 98-95.
A super powerful USSR was waiting in the title game
and it was just too strong. Valdis Valters scored 27 points,
Rimas Kurtinaitis had 24, Arvydas Sabonis 23 and Aleksandr
Volkov 18 to lead the USSR to a convincing 120-89
victory. In that game, Brabenec scored 21 points.
It wasn’t his last EuroBasket, however, as he also
played the following one in Athens and averaged 11.5
points at 36 years old. He also demonstrated that there
are no old and young players, but excellent, good, mediocre
and bad ones. He was one of the first, excellent
ones. That was not the end of his career, either. At 38 he
finally left his country, but didn’t go too far to join Debreceni
of Hungary, where he played for two seasons.
At age 40, he went back home to play for humble Zdar
nad Sazavou first, and then to spend his last two active
years until 1995 at Usti nad Labem, his boyhood club.
If that was not enough, the Brabenec name is still
a reference in Czech sports. His own son is a very famous
ice hockey player and his daughter Andrea was
an international player in basketball, the daughter of a
basketball scoring machine.
Jiri Zidek senior, the best Czech player of the 20th
century, and a teammate of Brabenec’s in the national
team, said the following about Brabenec:
“The greatest skill Kamil had was his shooting ability.
His trademark scoring move was the jump shot after the
dribble. He could create his own shots in one-on-one
situations, played small forward, and used screens well
to get open, receive the ball and play one-on-one,” Zidek
recalled.
Kamil Brabenec
101 greats of european basketball
B