They were two giants, two of the best ever in European basketball. For a time, your time, surely the two best that had stepped on the slopes. His time: after Radivoj Korac and Serguei Belov, before the big bang: Dirk Nowitzki, Pau Gasol… and the road that became a highway and on which Giannis Antetokounmpo, Nikola Jokic and Luka Doncic are now traveling at full speed. But before, between the past and the future, they were: Arvydas Sabonis y Drazen Petrovic.
Communicating vessels, condemned to cross paths. With Zalgiris and Cibona, Kaunas and Zagreb, two power centers of world basketball. With the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, before Croatia, Lithuania and the enormous global significance that Barcelona 92 had. Facing each other or on the same side of history: two Real Madrid legends, Petrovic (1988-89) before Sabonis (1992- 95). Two players drafted by the same NBA franchise in times (1986) when Europeans were not systematically selected and sometimes indiscriminate, like now: the good ones, very high. Those that we will see if they are, later and just in case. Born in 1964, Petrovic two months earlier, both were selected by the Portland Trail Blazers: Sabonis with the number 24, in the first round. Petrovic with 60, in what was the third of a cursed draft. Len Bias, the number 2 extraordinaire, died two days after being cast from a cocaine overdose. The drug also marked the careers of Chris Washburn (number 3), William Bedford (6) and Roy Tarpley (7).
Sabonis had been selected by the Hawks in 1985, with the number 77, but he was not yet 21 years old when his name and name were aired. pick of the Atlanta franchise was nullified. A year later, he shared generation with Petrovican irony of fate for two bitter enemies in a sticky year. The draft was held on June 17. Two and a half months earlier, on April 3, Petrovic’s Cibona beat Sabonis’s Zalgiris in a legendary European Cup final. Just one month after the ceremony on the other side of the Atlantic, the giant Soviet Union of Kaunas lifted an impossible semifinal at the World Cup in Spain, defeating Petrovic’s Yugoslavia in extra time (91-90) and played the final, where touched the feat against the United States (85-87).
The Blazers entourage saw that world duel on Spanish soil. Also Curry Kirkpatrick, a journalist for Sports Illustrated who found it downright amusing that the Oregon franchise had tied up two players who were simply sensational… but who couldn’t stand each other. “It is the joke of the year in the Old Continent“, wrote.
Budapest, epicenter of the rivalry
Sabonis had no problem publicly defining Petrovic as a “selfish” player and a “despicable” guy: “the horrible things he says about me show that he is unbalanced”. Petrovic, was told by his coach at Cibona, Zeljko Pavlicevic, vHe lived with a harmful anxiety the days before any duel against his nemesis: “He played two games, one for his team to win and the other to show Sabonis who was the best”. Pavlicevic even expelled Petrovic from training on the eve of a duel against Zalgiris because the player, consumed by that obsession, was unable to control himself.
In national team basketball, Sabonis beat Petrovic in that duel in 1986 and, above all, the 1988 Olympic final: 76-63, with 20 points and 15 rebounds from Sabonis and 24 points and 4 assists from Petrovic. When Yugoslavia crushed its demons against the Soviets in the 1990 World Cup final in Buenos Aires, Petrovic was there but not Sabonis. In 1992, already with Croatia and Lithuania and in the Games that changed basketball forever, the former took the silver and the latter the bronze, but they did not meet.
On the track, Petrovic flew over the territory in the Sabonis area, which was taken as something really personal the control of the cascading appearances of the point guard, who left his defender behind and challenged pivots who were much less mobile at the time than they are now and literally sold: if they left their space, Petrovic easily outwitted them. If they waited, Sibenik’s genius scores jumps that he was able to make, one after another, with his eyes closed. Sabonis, a 2.21 of prodigious mobility before the injuries that marked his career, was capable of upsetting Petrovic enough to make his life (somewhat) impossible. And to ensure that their duels had a high face-to-face component even though they did not share a position. It was, above all, a question of wills.
In 1986, before the draft and the World Cup in Spain, Cibona won its second European Cup in a row, the only two in its showcase. A year after embittering Real Madrid, the team yet Yugoslavian outclassed a Zalgiris (yet Soviet) who played his first final and who was not champion until 1999. The final, one of the most remembered ever, was played on April 3 at seven in the afternoon, at the Sportcsarnok in Budapest. A court with a capacity for 12,500 spectators in which there was a clear Balkan majority: 8,000 by 4,500.
La Cibona controlled the game: 47-39 at halftime despite 17 points and 8 rebounds from Sabonis, who finished with 27+17 but was sent off (the last nail in his team’s coffin) with eight minutes to go and after attacking Mihovil Nakic. Petrovic didn’t shine on title day (22 points, 6/18 shooting). Not at least at the level of those incredible years of supernova almost incomprehensible: in that 1985-86 European Cup he averaged 37 points. He scored 44 against Maccabi, 47 with 25 assists against Milan, 49 + 20 against Real Madrid and 51 + 10 against Limoges, whom he tortured with seven triples in a row in the first half.
Two conflicting stories in Portland
Petrovic did not win any more European Cups after those two. Sabonis got even in 1995, when he rose to the top of the Real Madrid pantheon, in Zaragoza. Neither won an NBA championship ring either, although the Lithuanian came close: in the 2000 playoffs, his Trail Blazers dominated the Lakers in Game 7 of the West finals at Staples Center. They had a 15-point lead in the last quarter and one foot in the Finals… but Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal got worse, signing a historic comeback culminating in a alley oop which is one of those images that everyone places, a milestone in the history of the playoffs. They were exceptional Blazers (Sabonis, Stoudamire, Rasheed Wallace, Scottie Pippen, Steve Smith…), a team that had won 59 games (59-23) and could well have been champions. The best in which a Sabonis played in the United States who did not make the leap, between bureaucratic issues and physical problems, until 1995, just after being European champion with Real Madrid.
By then, two years before the fact (a bloody June 7, 1993), Drazen Petrovic had already left his life on a road in Germany. He had just had a fabulous season with the Nets: 22+ points per game with nearly 45% shooting from 3-point range. At the age of 28, the uncorking on the other side of the Atlantic of a player who, however, brooded over a major anger because the Nets did not offer him the money he felt he deserved. Much has been written afterwards about his intentions: to change franchises, to abandon the NBA completely and return to Europe, sign for Panathinaikos if he opted for this second option… Be that as it may, at least it showed that his place was also among the best in the biggest League in the world. He did it in those Nets, after less than two seasons (1989-91) without any success in Portland, the franchise in which Sabonis later played. The giant with whom, paths always crossed despite him, he defined an unforgettable era of basketball.
