By Stathis Trapezanlidis/ info@eurohoops.net
Do you know which team put an end to the Soviets’ unbelievable streak of 8 wins in a row? Who the tallest player who has ever played in the tournament is? What team scored only one point in an entire game? Eurohoops presents 10 facts about the EuroBasket that you most likely don’t know about but that hold their own special kind of interest!
1. One non-European team have won the EuroBasket, Egypt. 19 different countries have won it in total, while 47 countries have competed with Iceland being the latest of those making their debut this year in Berlin. It’s not the first time that the EuroBasket is being held in 5 different cities like many believe, but it is the first time it’s being held in 4 different countries because of the situation in Ukraine.
2. The best offensive night was in 1955 with the 140 points that the Poles scored (140-44) against the British in the first round of the tournament, while the worst was the 1 (!!!) point of the Finns against Estonia in 1939! As would be expected, Finland has the worst offensive performance in a half in which they couldn’t score, while the best offensive performance in a half came in 1985 with the 73 points Russia scored against Italy.
3. The first EuroBasket in 1935 was held in Switzerland and was won by Latvia. All of the games in that tournament took place on open courts. In 1946 the shortest EuroBasket in history was held and lasted only five days. In that tournament 10 teams took part and Czechoslovakia were the winners.
4. In the first stage of the 1953 EuroBasket it took 4 overtimes (a record number) for Yugoslavia to beat Israel 57-55. The win with the biggest point difference belongs to the Soviets who crushed the Danes 118-12 (that’s 106 points).
5. In 1947 the EuroBasket took place outside of Europe (Egypt) and it was the tournament with the fewest teams in the history of the institution. Only 7 teams took part and 3 of them didn’t even come from Europe (Egypt, Syria, Lebanon). The hosts, Egypt, won it by defeating France in the final.
6. Three players who are competing in this year’s EuroBasket have been top scorers in the past. Those are Dirk Nowitzki, Tony Parker and Pau Gasol. In this competition the three superstars are after several records that they will likely break and write their names in the history books of the EuroBasket in even greater letters.
7. The oldest player in the history of the EuroBasket is Margus Metstak with the national team of Estonia (40 – 2001). Metstak competed in only two EuroBasket competitions (1993, 2001), but those were enough for him to put his name on a unique record in the history of the tournament. In fact, in his last EuroBasket, in which the Estonians came last, he had 8.3 points and 6 rebounds on average. On the other side, the Romanian Constantin Popa (16 years old) is the youngest player who has ever played in the tournament, and that was in 1987. In fact, Popa is also one of the tallest (2.20m) players in the history of the competition.
8. The tallest athlete who has ever competed in a EuroBasket is the Montenegrin Slavko Vranes (2.30m – 2011), while the shortest is Mario Gil Andrade Fernandes of Portugal (1.74m – 2007). The Portuguese have competed in just 3 EuroBasket competitions (1951, 2007, 2011) with Fernandes being a member of the best – at least theoretically – team that appeared in the tournament in 2007, when they finished in 9th place!
9. In 1971 the Soviets’ great streak came to an end after 8 consecutive wins, with Yugoslavia becoming the European champions. The Yugoslavs had an excellent team that year, but they weren’t the ones that put a stop to the Soviets’ streak. The Spanish managed that, winning in the semifinal 80-76.
10. Drazen Petrovic didn’t get to play in a EuroBasket with the Croatian national team because in 1993, a few weeks before the start of the tournament, he was tragically killed in a car accident, actually in the country that was going to host it, Germany.