An institution in European basketball and one of those iron sergeants 100% Balkan in spirit, Bozidar Maljkovic (a Serb born in Croatian territory long before the dismemberment, in 1952) is not a great NBA fan. He said that “any ACB Cup final is better than an NBA game”, and of course His training methods and playing style were never very American. He won four Euroleague, two with the effervescent Jugoplastika, one with the Limoges (the miracle 1993) and another with Panathinaikos, in 1996. It was a team that had Dominique Wilkins and that took, in Paris, one of the most controversial finals in history, against Barcelona and with the cap that was considered legal. Vrankovic to Montero. The game ended (67-66) without the referees (Dorizon and Virovnik) pointing out the infraction of the Panathinaikos center, who blocked Montero’s penetration after the ball clearly touched the board.
A year later, the PAO could not defend their title in the Final Four because they fell in the quarterfinals against their eternal Athenian rival, Olympiacos, who defeated Barcelona in the final again. That Panathinaikos had tried to add NBA dynamite with John Salley, the player nicknamed the spider and that he had only been in Athens for seven weeks. Salley arrived at the age of 32 in September 1996 and after not being able to find an NBA team.
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HO (REUTERS) He had just won his third NBA ring as a substitute very substitute on the 72-10 Bulls, Michael Jordan’s legendary team, Scottie Pippen… and Phil Jackson. Previously, he had won two titles as a major substitute in the Bad Boys Detroit Pistons, the great nemesis of Michael Jordan in his early career. After Athens, he spent more than two years in retirement and played one last season (1999-2000) with the Lakers, who won the first three-speed title from Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal … and Phil Jackson, who counted on him as a veteran and inspiring presence in a locker room with a lot of talent (Kobe, Shaq, Rice…) but little cohesion. Ron Harper, AC Green and Brian Shaw also arrived for the same reason, and the Lakers broke their losing streak and, in Jackson’s first season, they were proclaimed champions. Salley, with that title, became the first player with titles in three different franchises (Then they have Robert Horry, who played in those Lakers, LeBron James and Danny Green). And the first to wear rings in three different decades. In his good years (in Detroit and later in Miami) Salley (No. 11 in the draft in 1986) was a defender of dirty work and a lot of bullying in the zones. But the player who arrived at Panathinaikos was already far from his best physical form and, above all, he did not have the ability to adapt to other types of basketball, routines … and refereeing. In his first game, a thunderous defeat against Barcelona, he added 5 points and 5 personals in just 12 minutes. Increasingly faced with Maljkovic, who did not make a disciplinary exception with the newcomer, he left just over a month later. The coach did not count on him for a Cup match against PAOK because he had arrived an hour before the start. He was coming from America, from a meeting about a possible talk show he wanted to present for the Disney channels (he was close friends with Eddie Murphy), and to need a private plane from Paris ($ 20,000 out of his pocket) and a helicopter from the Athens airport. Maljkovic was not touched his odyssey and Salley returned home with $ 300,000. He had signed for a figure that exceeds a million or two depending on which source is consulted. That Salley and Maljkovic would be like oil and water, the center knew as soon as he met his new coach. In Three Ring Circus, Jeff Pearlman’s exceptional book on the Lakers Kobe and Shaquille (he is also the author of Showtime, the best book written about the Lakers by Magic Johnson), Salley tells that as soon as they were introduced, Maljkovic told her that Michael Jordan (with whom the power forward had just been champion) he was “a regular player” and that “in Europe he would average 16 points per game”. At that time, according to this book, Salley was clear: “There I saw that it would last little there”. It was, finally, seven weeks. Len Bias: cocaine took away the “great rival of Jordan” The dark first goodbye: the shadow of the bets, the murder of his father … ‘Jordan Adidas’: his mother changed the sneaker business forever Horace Grant: “Jordan is a liar. If he wants, we’ll fix it like men.” LaBradford Smith, Jordan’s enemy who never wanted to be “I was like a vampire”: wild routines during the filming of Space Jam
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