By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Dario Saric is often mentioned as a potential Panathinaikos transfer target and where there’s smoke there’s also fire. The Nuggets forward himself confirmed that the Greek defending EuroLeague champions wanted to sign him the past two summers.
As he said to COSMOTE TV, while he was having talks with Denver this summer, where he ultimately signed a two-year deal, Panathinaikos was also interested in him.
“I think my agent can tell you better about that, but at that time, I was having an offer in Denver, and I hadn’t decided yet whether I wanted to stay in the NBA or do I want to come back to Europe and have a bigger role. I didn’t know at that time if I was going to stay in the NBA or I was going to go to Panathinaikos”, he stated.
This was not a surprise for him, since Panathinaikos also talked with him in the summer of 2023: “I know that the year before, the assistant coach of Panathinaikos told me that Panathinaikos wanted me. We kind of had a contact. The first time he told me was when we beat Turkey in the pre-Olympic qualifiers. He kind of told me ‘We want to bring you back,’ but I signed with Golden State that year.”
It has to be noted that since 2012, Saric and Panathinaikos have been in contact about a possible collaboration, as he told himself more than a decade ago to Eurohoops.
It remains to be seen if that can happen sometime in the future.