This shıt got a paywall, breh.
When Dražen Petrović joined the
Portland Trail Blazers in 1989, he already had several nicknames. Most were not subtle.
In Europe, fans called him “Mozart,” a tribute to his artistry and flair. One Italian newspaper dubbed him “The Holy Terror from Zagreb.” Another said he was “the White Isiah Thomas.”
At times, he was “Petro.” In other moments, he was “Draz.” When he starred for Real Madrid, one of the powers of European basketball, he was “Perro Caliente,” the hot dog.
And then, there was the special moniker from Arvydas Sabonis, the great Lithuanian center and a chief rival on the Soviet national team: He once called Petrović “Clown.”
Petrović probably was the best offensive basketball player in the world outside the NBA, a 6-foot-5 guard with deep range, feathery touch and a proto-Euro step —
the “Lawrence Welk move,” as legendary scout Marty Blake put it — but he also was a character, a fiery Croatian virtuoso who hoisted 3-pointers, flipped behind-the-back passes and drove opponents crazy.
In 1985, he
scored 112 points in one gamefor Cibona Zagreb. In 1988, he led the former Yugoslavia to a silver medal at the Seoul Olympics. But when he arrived in the NBA, nobody was certain if it would work.
This is partly because “Mozart,” in this case, possessed a lackluster reputation on the defensive end. But it also was because there had never been a player like him, a foreign star who came of age outside the traditional feeder system of American college basketball. When Petrović joined the Blazers, he told reporters that he’d come to America to challenge himself, to prove he could play against the best in the world, to be the equivalent of a franchise player.
If he had to be the first of his kind, he wanted to make sure he was not the last.
Three decades later, it’s easy to forget how the perception of foreign basketball players has changed. Once upon a time, before Dirk and Pau, before the Greek Freak and Joker, before Peja and Kukoc and Manu and Yao and Luka and the other players who changed the NBA, there was a league that looked different, devoid of novel influences and larger talent pools and the Euro step.
Consider, for instance, the early days. In the decades after Dr. James Naismith hung the first peach baskets, the sport of basketball began to spiderweb around the globe, debuting at the Summer Olympics in 1936 — where Naismith watched the Americans win gold on a muddy court in Berlin — and taking root all across Europe. The evolution continued in the decades after World War II, when the sport became a favorite behind the Iron Curtain.
But if the sport was growing around the globe, the NBA was not. Take a cursory glance at the first Europeans to play in the league, and you’ll find a familiar story: Credited with being the
first European player in league history was the Italian-born Hank Biasatti, who grew up in Canada and debuted for the Toronto Huskies of the Basketball Association of America in 1946.
The second and third (Frido Frey and Charlie Hoefer) were German kids who immigrated to the United States and grew up in New York. The trend continued for decades; foreigners who broke through often were big men who arrived by way of Canada or a U.S. high school. It didn’t help, of course, that the players in eastern Europe often were walled off from the West, or that international players had to maintain amateur status to compete in the
Olympics.
Consider, too,
The Athletic’s NBA 75, included just four international players among its ranking of the league’s best players — and only two (No. 24
Giannis Antetokounmpo and No. 21 Dirk Nowitzki) who did not play in college first. It’s possible that Petrović would have been on this list, too, had he not died in a car crash in 1993, just as his career was taking off.
Just consider his path.
How did the NBA go global? College basketball deserves an assist. It wasn’t until the late 1970s and early ’80s, when college coaches started mining talent overseas, that everything started to change. Guy Lewis found Hakeem Olajuwon in Nigeria and brought him to the University of Houston. Marv Harshman discovered a German foreign exchange student named Detlef Schrempf and recruited him to Washington.
Around the same time, Digger Phelps, the coach at Notre Dame,
used an old contact to recruit a guard from Yugoslavia. His name: Drazen Petrović.
He had grown up in Šibenik (in present-day Croatia), a city along the Adriatic coast. His father was a police officer, his mother was a librarian, and for most of his youth, his only exposure to the NBA had come, in part, through grainy clips on Italian television. Nevertheless, Petrović quickly took to the sport, following the lead of his older brother, Aleksandar, growing into the European version of a gym rat.
Petrović starred for the local club, debuted for the Yugoslavian national team — for whom he competed against American colleges on a tour in 1982 — then joined Cibona Zagreb in 1984, spurning Notre Dame along the way. When he helped Yugoslavia win a bronze medal at the 1984 Summer Olympics (played at The Forum in Inglewood, Calif.), he was already on the radar of American scouts and reporters.
As Petrović blossomed, the basketball world underneath him began to shift. In 1985, the
Phoenix Suns took a chance on a big man from Bulgaria named Georgi Glouchkov, the “Balkan Banger” as he was known. It didn’t work out — Glouchkov was amiable if not that athletic — but perhaps the experiment planted a seed. There was talent elsewhere; scouts just had to search.
The same year Glouchkov returned to Europe, Blazers executive Bucky Buckwalter was formulating his vision. Inspired by his experiences in international basketball — he
coached the Brazilian national team in 1975— he saw foreign players as an underappreciated asset. On the day of the 1986 NBA Draft, he shocked the establishment by using two picks on Europeans. In the first round, Portland drafted Sabonis, the adroit giant from the Soviet Republic of Lithuania. In the third round, it took a flier on Petrović, scooping him up one spot in front of Minnesota center John Shasky.
theathletic.com
. I still have his rookie card. Thats what made the bulls go and get Toni Kukoc
