By Semih Tuna/ Stuna@eurohoops.net
Despite numerous offers from high-level teams from Europe, Dusan Alimpijevic is continuing at Bursaspor, which he led to the EuroCup finals last season, per Eurohoops sources.
Alimpijevic was named EuroCup coach of the year, beating highly respectable competition which included legends like Zeljko Obradovic and Sergio Scariolo.
Alimpijevic, at 35 the youngest coach to win the award, guided Bursaspor all the way to the EuroCup Finals in his first full season in the competition. He engineered a rarely seen in-season turnaround that saw his team win just four of its first 13 games before going on a run of 8-1 that included three postseason road wins in a span of just 14 days.
Alimpijevic started his coaching career at age 22, working as an assistant in Novi Sad and Vojvodina in his native Serbia. While in Vojvodina, he survived the fatal crash of a team bus in 2010 that left his head coach and one player dead while Alimpijevic was hospitalized for more than a month.
He would make his head-coaching debut with Vojvodina and head the bench of Spartak Subotica, too, before joining FMP Zeleznik in 2016. His breakthrough came in the 2017-18 season when as a 31-year old he led Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade to an 11-19 record in the Turkish Airlines EuroLeague and guided the club to the Adriatic League finals.
Since then, Alimpijevic coached Avtodor Saratov in Russia before taking over at Bursaspor in November 2020 and winning three of the team’s last four games in the 2020-21 EuroCup season.