By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Miami Heat training camps are considered among the toughest in the NBA, but Simone Fontecchio had already experienced something even more demanding under Dusko Ivanovic at Baskonia.
“Last year, Spoelstra asked me whether Miami’s training camp was the hardest I had ever experienced,” Fontecchio told the YouTube channel La Giornata Tipo. “I said that, if it made him happy, I could say it was. In the NBA, yes. But not in my entire life.”
Fontecchio joined Baskonia immediately after representing Italy at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. His Olympic campaign ended on August 8, while Ivanovic’s preseason began two days later.
“I was still in Japan and had to stop in Italy, so I very timidly asked Dusko if I could arrive later,” he recalled. “He said: ‘Of course. We start on the 10th, but you can come on the 12th.’”
After a 13-hour journey, Fontecchio reached Vitoria around lunchtime and assumed he would be given time to recover.
“Dusko told me: ‘Go and complete your physical tests. Practice is scheduled for 4 p.m., but don’t worry—we’ll move it to 6 p.m. so you can join us.’”
While the rest of the team had the following day off, Fontecchio was instructed to run with the strength and conditioning coach to make up for the days he had missed.
“It was a mystical experience,” he said.
Fontecchio added that even those sessions were supposedly less demanding than Ivanovic’s practices during his earlier Baskonia tenure.
“People who had worked with Dusko in the 2000s told us our practices were nothing compared to theirs.”
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