By Nikos Varlas/ varlas@eurohoops.net
This is the fifth season of Nikos Zisi in Italy, he already have won three championships and he is getting ready as a player of Siena for the play offs. The big goal of the Euroleague Final Four is gone, but life goes on and Siena is on the hunt of a historical record…
No team in the history of the Italian League has won six straight championships. From the 1948-9 season until now there were some great strikes. There has been teams with three, or four straight titles, but only one, besides Siena, with five straight!
Borletty Milano of legendery Cesare Rubini from 1949 until 1954 was the team to beat in Italy. Rubini, a veritable sportsman, a basketball and water polo player-coach with titles, medals and championships in club and national team competitions, had also won 10 more championships as the coach of Simmenthal Milano form 1957 until 1972, but the streak with Borletty remains his biggest.
If Siena of coach Simone Panigiani wins this season’s championship, it will became the first Italian team in history with six straight titles and that’s a huge motive for everyone in Tuscany.
How easy is for a team with such a lofty goal to… accept the Euroleague failure of not qualifying to the Final Four? “The first days were really hard. Euroleague Final Four was our big goal, we wanted to be there for the second straight season. The administration of the team really fortified our roster. They brought back from NBA David Andersen, a top level player. Even throughout the season, when we had bad luck with injuries, the management did its best in order to help us to our foal. But failure is also a part of the sport”, says to Eurohoops.net Nikos Zisis and explains how everybody now in Italy are trying to beat Siena with… Olympiacos’ recipe.
“We talked a lot, trying to figure out what went wrong. We said that we have to correct our mistakes and show a better image. The model for every opponent is what Olympiacos did against us. There are unwritten laws of life that also apply to basketball. Siena was always characterized by its energy and thirst. When you play in finals, you have to give everything you got. It will be hard for anyone to repeat the great records of Siena. And in all those season there was one dominating element. In every play, everybody was fighting like it was the end of the world. That element made Siena invincible”.
In Sunday the regular season in Italy is ending and everybody want to… dethrone Siena. Zisis speaks about the opponents who want to end his team reign: “Milano is very improved and they just added one more American guard (ed.note: NBADL MVP Justin Dentmon). It’s a team with great motive and clear goal, the championship title. The same applies for Cantu, a team with the same core of players in the last three seasons. Perkins is their key. They sure want to beat us, at least win some games in the finals. It will be really important for them to recover their injured players, Shermadini and Micov. In Italy there are also many teams that can beat you in their court. The gyms are full and the championship is getting more competitive. Teams like Sassari and Cantu have made many good things, and opponents like Pezaro and Virtus Bologna are always dangerous. Avelino also had some good game and a player-phenomenon, Marques Green. He is just 1,68 m. and he does incredible stuff in the court”!
Many things are heard about the future of Siena, the possible relocation to an other city (because of the Euroleague rule that connects the A Licence with a court of at least 10.000 seats capacity), even the redaction of the budget. The players of the team don’t have any information about all those matters yet.
“Those are just rumors. I remember when we had played a warm up game against Cajasol Seville in Florence. Our fans never wanted for Siena to relocate in an other city and they were pretty vocal about it. I know that there is a plan for a new bigger gym in the city, but the contraction stopped due to the crisis. The budget issue is something that concerns every team in Europe. Our main sponsor is a bank and we are waiting to see what will happen in the summer. For now we have a historical goal, to win six championships in a row, something that never happened before. This is what’s on our mind right now”.
What is the view of a starter in a successful national team, like Greece, about the future of the Italian national team, given his first hand knowledge about Italian basketball; “From 2005 the result of the Italian national team are not successful and it did not even qualified in some big events. Sometimes national teams are a matter of generations. In Greece we had the luck to have a great generation of players born between 1977 and 1980, plus some a little younger like me and Spanoulis. There was chemistry between us, there was talent and we succeeded. We started our effort in 2004 Olympics with a bitter defeat in the quarterfinal from Argentina. But we believed in each other and maybe that is what Italy is missing. There is a lot of talent here, there is a discussion about the excessive use of foreign players, but I think that there is lack of confidence in Italian players”.
But there is a plan. “Coach Pianigiani told me that the federation is ready to start a program in order to create a team with players that have the basketball background but they don’t have international experience. Players that will not even play in the Italian play offs, but there are capable to, so they can work together and prepare for the future. Italy has the right pedigree, it just went through a generation crisis. Now there three solid NBA players, Bargnani, Belineli and Galonari. They want to play for their national team and I think that Italy has a new generation of talent that can bring her back to the elite. Young guys, like Aradori, Gentile, Melli, Hackett, Poeta, Datome with a coach like Simone Pianigiani will restore Italy to its former glory”, explains Zisis that after two season in Treviso and three in Siena understands very well the difference in the sport mentality between Greeks and Italians, “It’s not such a great difference. Everything has to do with timing and specially result. The difference is Italy is than you are not the absolute… god if you win and you are not the absolute loser if you don’t! That tends to happen in Greece”.
The Greek guard feels that Italy is now his second home and maybe he will be even a permanent resident: “The truth is that Italy is now a very important part of my life. I speak the language pretty well. I was lucky enough to win championships with the exception of the season of the Lorbek case in Treviso. I feel like I am at home. I like it and my family likes it. The country fits my philosophy of life. Maybe it’s meant to be that way, I never expected when I left for CSKA Moscow that I would return in Italy. Now, even the idea of spending the rest of my life in Italy doesn’t sound bad to me at all”.