101 Greats of European Basketball

A museum
of Europe's
basketball
superstars
My introduction to European basketball was a painful
one. At the European qualifying tournament for the
1992 Barcelona Olympics, I was invited to play a morning
pickup game with other journalists. A bald guy on
the other team crossed me over with his dribbling skill
in the way that is now called „breaking ankles” – but in
this case literally left me with a swollen foot. After we
lost the first game against his team, mine huddled to
discuss strategy.
„Somebody needs to help me with that bald guy,”
I said, panting. A teammate of mine from Sports Illustrated
looked at me like I was crazy. „That bald guy?”
he said. „Don't tell me you don't know who that is.” It
turns out that I was being schooled by Juan Antonio
Corbalan, the subject of one chapter in this book, who
had recently been making assists to another legend
from these pages, Arvydas Sabonis.
If I had known my good friend Vladimir Stankovic
then, maybe I would have been saved from my embarrassment.
The truth is that his collection here of 101
of the greatest retired players in European basketball
was long overdue for more people than just me. The
list of Europe's stars stretches from 1950s pioneers
– some of whom, like Pino Djerdja, even today's most
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knowledgeable fans might not know – all the way to the
most recently retired legend, Dimitris Diamantidis. It
amounts to walk of fame spanning the 60 years to date
that European club competitions have given an international
stage to basketball on the Old Continent.
My own fascination with European basketball soon
improved my knowledge. At that Olympics qualifying
tournament, I quickly found my favorite player, Jure
Zdovc, whose story is also here. He missed those Olympics
by one shot, but a year later he won the EuroLeague
in one of the biggest upsets ever. At Barcelona Olympics
themselves, Sarunas Marciulionis, another protagonist
of this book, took me on the Lithuanian national team's
bus to do an interview, and I also met Arturas Karnisovas,
another player you can read about here.
The first EuroLeague game I saw live was in 1996,
after I had moved permanently to Spain. Caja San
Fernando of Seville, coached by Aca Petrovic – he and
his late brother Drazen figure in many of these stories
– was hosting Partizan Belgrade in Seville. In the years
between the Barcelona Olympics and that game in
Seville, I had spent most nights sitting courtside as an
NBA reporter, so close to the action that players often
dripped sweat on my notebooks.
On this night in Seville, also in a courtside seat, I
soon stopped taking notes and just watched in growing
disbelief, my mouth wide open in surprise. In hundreds
of games during that era of isolation one-on-one plays
in the NBA, I had witnessed nothing as close to true
team basketball as I was seeing now. Before my eyes
were 10 players in non-stop motion, offenses and defenses
moving in split-second synergy like a high-speed
chess match. I remember being struck, too, by the
speed of shooters and defenders racing from sideline
to sideline, through and around multiple screens, in a
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