By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Here’s the article on the Top 10 Centers, presented by EuroLeague.net:
I must admit, this has been the hardest list to put together. Before I cut it down to 10 names, I had to go through many championships, games and names, adding and then subtracting candidates, looking for criteria… Eventually, I had to settle on 10, but I think the short list had about 20 more names. But as some coach said about impossible missions, “You cannot put a liter and a half inside a one-liter bottle.” Some big names are not included just because their presence at club level in Europe was limited, such as Marc Gasol and Rick Smits. Others are not here because they won most of their titles with national teams, like Trajko Rajkovic, Vinko Jelovac, Ratko Radovanovic, Stojko Vrankovic , Zeljko Jerkov and Zeljko Rebraca for Yugoslavia, or Panagiotis Fasoulas of Greece or Alzhan Zarmuhamedov and Vladimir Andreeev from the Soviet Union.
Atanas Golomeev of Bulgaria was the top scorer in the 1973 and 1975 EuroBaskets with more than 22 points per game, but his team never won anything. Jiri Zidek Sr. came closer and won medals in the late 1960s, when he was the pillar of great club and national teams in Czechoslovakia. The likes of Fabricio Oberto, Erazem Lorbek, Dejan Tomasevic, Nenad Krstic and Rudy Gobert nearly made the list, and I also kept out Aleksandar Belov, the author of the infamous Olympics gold-medal winning basket in Munich in 1972. So these are the remaining 10. Oh, by the way, the list is not necessarily in order, and again, it’s my opinion only!
10. NIKOLA VUJCIC (1978)
Arguably the most versatile big man this century, Vujcic helped Maccabi Tel Aviv reach the top again. Together they made three consecutive EuroLeague championship games and won the first two of them, in 2004 and 2005. That made Maccabi the only back-to-back EuroLeague champ between 1991 and 2013. Vujcic made it to another EuroLeague final with Olympiacos Piraeus in 2010 and also played for his hometown team, Split, as well as ASVEL Lyon-Villeurbanne and Efes Pilsen Istanbul. He was voted to the All-EuroLeague Team five times, including three consecutive first-team appearances from 2005 to 2007, and authored the competition’s only two triple-doubles to date. He is also the only EuroLeague player to collect at least 2,000 career points (2,444), 1,000 rebounds (1,037) and 500 assists (524).