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By the way, on this day 27 years ago, Drazen Petrovic died in a tragic car accident. He was the first big Euro star in NBA and by many best Euro player ever. In his last season (1992-1993) he was averaging 22.3 pts, on 52/45/87 shooting, and I am sure that in the next season he would entered that prestigious 50/40/90 club. No Euro player before him had such numbers back in those days, when NBA generally considered players from Europe as 2nd rate players, not giving them any freedom. Younger NBA fans probably never heared about him, but this is what Reggie Miller had to say when they asked him about best shooters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7AhrUIc87oDespite having some very talented players like Kukoc and Radja, our (Croatian) national basketball team never recovered from his death, as he was was our captain and leader. If there was ever European basketball player that could be compared to MJ based on his main traits (competitiveness, leadership and work ethic) that would be Drazen.
RIP to the legend. I first heard of Drazen in documentaries.
I don't know the complete details (and I don't wanna go there) but had Yugoslavia remained intact, they could have dominated the World basketball longer and their national team would have given the 1992 Dream team real problems or even defeat them. Who knows?
It is okay though, they are still young, from Murray to White to Walker they have great youngsters, Jakob has been playing very well too, so they actually have a great young core that could get better with time, so they can miss the playoffs as long as they keep on improving with the team they have.
Looks nice in theory but we gotta consider the fact that these young cores could be separated at anytime. Murray will probably stay and become the next face of the franchise but we couldn't say the same to the other youngster.
TBH, these young core of the Spurs now are nowhere near to the big 3 of the spurs before (Duncan, Parker, and Ginóbili). so I don't expect spurs will be successful if they will not get another star players that have already prove himself from a team he is playing with now.
Definitely not but they're performing quite well. In fact, these youngsters are outperforming some of their seniors. That's a good thing and bad thing at the same time. It would have been better if the likes of DeRozan would set an example for them.