Basketball
Greece has a long tradition and history of success in basketball, which is very popular in the country. Greece was one of the eight founding members of FIBA in 1932 and the national governing body is the Hellenic Basketball Federation, member of FIBA Europe. The Greek national basketball team is considered among the world's top basketball powers; ranked 4th in the world, they are the current FIBA World Championship silver medalists since 2006 and the EuroBasket bronze medalists since 2009. They have been crowned European champions twice, in 1987 and 2005, and they have also won two more medals at European level, the silver in 1989 and the bronze in 1949. At the Olympic Games they have been placed 5th in three occasions. The 1987 gold medal was the first win for a Greek national team in a major tournament in any team sport, thus basketball became extremely popular in Greece after that achievement. The youth national teams of Greece have also enjoyed great success, having won a lot of medals in the respective World and European tournaments.
The Greek Basket League is the top professional basketball league in Greece and one of the strongest in Europe, while several Greek clubs have won major European titles. AEK Athens was the first-ever Greek team, not only to reach a European Cup Final, but also to win a European title. On April 4, 1968, AEK defeated Slavia Prague by a score of 89-82, in Athens before 120,000 spectators, 80,000 watching from inside the stadium and 40,000 watching from outside (the Guinness world record in basketball attendance). Panathinaikos, one of the most successful European clubs with six Euroleague titles, and Olympiacos, two times European champions and three times runners-up, are considered among the top basketball powers in Europe. Aris, AEK Athens, PAOK and Maroussi have also won at least one of the rest of the European cups, such as the Saporta Cup, the Korać Cup and the EuroCup Challenge, while all of them - except for Maroussi - have made it to the Euroleague final four. In women's basketball, Athinaikos have won the EuroCup. A number of Greek players have gained notability for their achievements such as Nikos Galis, widely regarded as one of the all-time greatest players in international basketball history, Panagiotis Giannakis, Panagiotis Fasoulas, Fanis Christodoulou, Theodoros Papaloukas and Dimitris Diamantidis. The Greek players that have played in the NBA are Efthimios Rentzias, Vassilis Spanoulis, Antonis Fotsis, Andreas Glyniadakis, Jake Tsakalidis and Greek Americans Kosta Koufos and Kurt Rambis. Anastasia Kostaki and Evanthia Maltsi are female Greek professional basketball players that have played in the WNBA.
Read more about this topic: Sport In Greece
Famous quotes containing the word basketball:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)