By Niki Bakouli/ bakouli@eurohoops.net
Panathinaikos will probably have to wait until the summer in order to get either Walter Hodge, or Antonis Fotsis (photo), even if there’s still a slight chance of him returning to Athens with the clock ticking for the Wednesday deadline.
The Hodge case is simple. The player has an offer, as he confirmed to Eurohoops, but his team is not interested in selling him at this point, since there is a signed contract with him for next season. Hodge will try to win the Polish league with Zielona Gora, which will have the luxury to sell him in the summer, if it decides to do so.
On the contrary, the Fotsis negotiations are a mess. According to Italian sources, Armani Milano insists that the proposed buy out from the Greens is not 500.000 US dollars, as it was published, and they had informed from the first moment the agent of Fotsis that their wanting price was higher. Also the Italians are furious about the fact that an offer sheet was posted in onsports.gr, the website owned by Panathinaikos‘ owner Dimitris Giannakopoulos.
Still the negotiations are not completely dead yet, even if Fotsis’ agent seems to have different terms now, wanting for his client to be paid 80% of his annual contract, meaning getting also 200.000 euros from Milan as a compensation for leaving. So it’s difficult to happen, but there ‘s still a day for all the interested parties to find common ground and the transaction to happen.