By Vangelis Papadimitriou/ info@eurohoops.net
Eurohoops will attempt to pick out the ten most characteristic cases of players, who, even though they had the necessary individual potential to be crowned European champions, their choices or their teams did not allow them to!
As you will see on our list, there are players who didn’t stay to try because the NBA came calling, and there is one case of someone who, even though he played in Europe for a very short time, he came closer to the ultimate goal than any of the others!
Alphonso Ford
Team: Peristeri (2000-2001, 12 games), Olympiacos (2001-2002, 20 games), Siena (2002-2003, 22 games)
EuroLeague stats: 22.2 points, 3.9 rebounds, 2.7 assists, 1.5 steals
We begin our list with the top American scorer. Alphonso Ford was the epitome of the… ‘machine gun’ and he couldn’t be missing from the top ten. A huge scorer and a teammate who inspired confidence in his team!
Ford never got to the top of the EuroLeague and this is because he only had one chance to play for the trophy. In the 2002/03 season, he and Siena qualified for the Final Four in Barcelona but couldn’t emerge victorious from the “civil war” against Benetton and made do with third place.
All this took place just one year before Ford’s tragic loss, at 32 years of age. The American gave in to leukemia but left behind a great legacy in basketball. In fact, to honor him, the EuroLeague named the award for each season’s top scorer after him!
Marcus Brown
Team: Benetton (2000-2001, 10 games), Efes Pilsen (2001-2003, 38 games), CSKA Moscow (2003-2005, 45 games), Unicaja Malaga (2005-2007, 28 games), Zalgiris Kaunas (2007-2008 and 2009-2011, 42 games), Maccabi Tel Aviv (2008-2009, 16 games)
EuroLeague stats: 15.3 points, 2.5 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 1.0 steals
For almost 11 years, Marcus Brown was one of the best players in the EuroLeague. An amazing scorer, the three-point shot being his weapon of choice, Brown played in several teams and always did what he knew best: put the ball in the basket.
He was never able to reach the top, even though he played in teams that had big goals. From 2003 to 2005 he was in CSKA Moscow, but the only thing he holds on to from that stint was his presence in the All-EuroLeague First Team in the 2003/04 season.
Like we said, Brown was unstoppable in the offense. It’s telling that he was also the top scorer of the EuroLeague for a while, and even though he retired 7 years ago, he’s still among the top ten scorers, in sixth place with 2.739 points!
Igor Rakocevic
Team: Buducnost (2000-2002, 25 games), Real Madrid (2005-2006, 20 games), Tau Ceramica (2006-2009, 65 games), Efes Pilsen (2009-2011, 30 games), Siena (2011-2012, 19 games)
EuroLeague stats: 14.6 points, 2.3 rebounds, 2 assists, 0.8 steals
Another great shooter and scorer. The Serbian guard was an oasis and a basket-producing machine. We’ll only mention that he has received the Alphonso Ford award three times as the top scorer in the competition! No one has more such awards than the now 40-year-old Rakocevic.
In spite of what he did on the court, he never got a trophy. Rakocevic had the chance to be crowned European champion twice, but Tau, who made 4 Final Fours in a row, always encountered obstacles on the road to success.
In 2007, they lost to subsequent European champions, Panathinaikos, while they couldn’t qualify for the final the next season either, as CSKA Moscow defeated them in the semifinal and eventually won the EuroLeague trophy in Madrid.
Pablo Prigioni
