By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
As Stankovic himself says, “They say there are two kinds of coaches: the ones that start building a team with a reliable point guard and the ones that build the team around a quality center. Normally, the coaches coming from the “Yugoslav School” tend to fall in the first group, while American coaches tend to like the big man better. Myself, as a “proper Yugoslav”, I share the idea that in order for the team to work properly, you need a good playmaker who can also score when necessary.
Taking a walk down memory lane, I came up with this list of 10 point guards that I liked the most, but I also think that some others deserve to, at least, be mentioned. I am talking about Juan Antonio Corbalan, Mike D’Antoni, Aldo Ossola, Nacho Solozabal, Rato Tvrdic, Jure Zdovc, Rafa Jofresa, David Rivers, Elmer Bennett and Tyus Edney. However, memory is something relative, because it can be influenced by factors like having seen one player more times than another, as in my case. Some of these playmakers are still active, and some others are accomplished coaches or sport directors, but all of them played a big role in the history of European basketball.”
10. IVO DANEU (1937)
The ‘patriarch’ of Slovenian basketball. He was the great captain of Olimpija Ljubljana and the Yugoslav national team during the sixties, also a world champ in 1970. He formed a great duo on the national team with Radivoj Korac, an unforgettable scorer, but many of those points came from Daneu’s assists. He was a born leader, a fighter, an ideologist of the game and also a scorer if the team needed it. He was the great frustrated signing of Santiago Bernabeu, president of Real Madrid, after Daneu’s great performance at the Madrid Final Four in 1967 with Olimpija. His son Jaka played in Olimpija and his grandson Jure is also playing there right now.