ALEKSANDAR NIKOLIC_31 Masterminds of European Basketball

Professor
of basketball
Aleksandar
Nikolic
The great thing about coaches who
started their careers in the 1950s
was their capacity for self-education.
With only a bunch of books and no
television – not to mention videos
or the Internet – they had to learn
from their mistakes and invent things based on
intuition. That’s what happened with Alexander
Gomelskiy, Ranko Zeravica and Pedro Ferrandiz,
all of whom I have already written about in this
series. Now, let‘s move on to Aleksandar Nikolic,
who is generally regarded as the father of Yugoslav
basketball.
I was lucky enough to know him for many years
and interview him several times, during which he
always justified his nickname, “The Professor“. Everybody
knows him by that name, which describes
him 100 percent. The nickname came from his position
at a school of physical education, but he was,
in all truth, a professor of basketball and not only for
his students. Every sentence he uttered emanated
deep knowledge of the sport.
I have some notes from my conversations with
him, which I think could be regarded as his basketball
creed, and are points that all young coaches
should know:
To score a basket you must first steal the ball.
The win is a merit of the players, the loss is to be
blamed on the coach.
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Vladimir Stankovic
There are no players for offense or defense only.
You must not build a team, but players.
Early specialization of players is fatal because it
provokes mistakes which are almost impossible to fix
later on.
The winner is not the team scoring the most
points, but the team receiving the least.
If possible, you have to win by 50 or more points,
but you must never humiliate the opponent.
The young player must have his chance to play in a
close game, not when you lead by 20.
The coach learns from his players.
Basketball technique was invented by players, not
coaches.
When I stop correcting your mistakes, it means
that I no longer believe in you.
I want to highlight one: “The winner is not the team
scoring the most points, but the team receiving the
least.” This perfectly defines his philosophy: defense
above all else. Nikolic believed the potential of a team
came from the ferocity of its defense. All of his teams
were characterized by good defense, but he also had a
lot of trust in good players. And he was lucky to coach
many stars. Sometimes, in practices, he played with
two balls at the same time to improve the skills and
reactions of the players. He did the physical training
at the end of practices because he wanted players to
be fresh at the start. This he made up himself, but he
also later confirmed it in the United States.
For friends he was always „Aca”, a classic abbreviation
for Aleksandar. Nikolic was born in Sarajevo on
October 28, 1924, after some coincidences saw his
mother move there from Brcko, also in Bosnia, where
the Nikolic had family lived well thanks to several
businesses run by Aca’s father. When the family later
moved to Belgrade, it was a crucial moment for the
future career of young Aca. During the German occupation
in World War II, he started playing basketball
and after the war he became an international with
Yugoslavia. Due to his height, just 1.65 meters, he
played point guard. Nikolic once told me that he was
blamed for the first Yugoslavia loss against Romania
in Bucharest on September 22, 1946, by the score
of 27-30, because he turned the ball over twice and
missed an easy basket in the last minutes of the game.
Nikolic played for Partizan from 1945 to 1947, for
Crvena Zvezda from 1947 to 1949 and for Zeleznicar
Belgrade and BSK Belgrade (later OKK Belgrade) from
1950 to 1951. But as soon as he started playing, he
also showed great interest in becoming a coach. In
1953, after the FIBA EuroBasket in Moscow, Nikolic
was put in charge of the national team and made his
debut at the 1954 FIBA Basketball World Cup in Rio.
He remained in the position until 1966 and, with him
on the bench, the first medals of Yugoslav basketball
were won: a silver medal at EuroBasket 1961 in Belgrade
and a bronze medal captured in Poland two
years later.
Travelling to America
After Nikolic had led Yugoslavia to two EuroBasket
medals and a sixth-place finish at its first participation
in the Olympic Games in Rome in 1960, the Yugoslav
Federation decided in 1963 to send him to the United
States for six months to increase his knowledge. That
long trip was a turning point in his career. He discovered
“another basketball” and learned a lot, but still
initially decided he would not apply anything he had
learned. He thought that his players, accustomed to
other concepts, would have little time to adapt to the
new knowledge he had brought from the States. Ultimately,
however, the challenge of trying new things
was too strong to resist and he did try to make a few
changes, especially with the zone press and the use
of the body.
Aside from his work with the national team, in
the 1960s Aca coached OKK Belgrade and won the
Yugoslav Cup in 1962 and the league title in 1963. It
was a great team with Radivoj Korac, Trajko Rajkovic,
Miodrag Nikolic and Slobodan Gordic, who were all
members of the national team as well.
After the 1965 EuroBasket in Tbilisi and Moscow,
and with a new silver medal under his belt, Nikolic left
the Yugoslav team in the hands of his assistant, Ranko
Zeravica. He moved to Italy, where his first stop was
Petrarca Padova, a humble team that finished third
behind only the two giants, Simmenthal Milano and Ignis
Varese, with a 16-6 record, including 10-1 at home.
Among his stars was an American, Doug Moe, who was
the league’s top scorer with 674 points at an average of
30.6 per game. Coaches normally are hesitant to answer
questions like, “Who was the best player you ever
had?” but when I asked this question to the Professor,
he had no doubts about it: Doug Moe.
The American player had arrived in Italy with the
idea of joining Milano, but someone there decided he
was not good enough. That’s how Moe ended up in
Padova. Professor Nikolic described him as a great
shooter (he made at least 300 shots in each practice),
a great rebounder, and very smart in reading the
game. In the second year, Padova finished 10th and
Moe was the league’s number two scorer with 24.8
points per game, behind the 25.1 per game scored by
Bologna’s Gianfranco Lombardi.
Varese then called upon Nikolic in 1969, at the
start of its great project that had the European crown
as its main goal. At the end of the Italian League season,
Varese was the champ with 20 wins and 2 losses
led by the great Mexican scorer Manuel Raga, whose
25.4 points per game ranked second in the league to
Elnardo Webster of Gorizia. Ottorino Flaborea, Aldo
Ossola, Dino Meneghin, Antonio Bulgheroni and Edoardo
Rusconi were also on that team, whose scoring
average of 87.0 points was rather high for that age.
The great European goal was accomplished the
following season. Ignis eliminated Tapion Honka of
Finland and in Group B of the quarterfinals placed
second behind CSKA Moscow, but still advanced to
the semis. There, it met Ferrandiz’s Real Madrid. The
first game, played on 11 March 1970, went to Ignis
86-90 in Madrid behind 29 points by Ricky Jones, 22
by Raga, 14 by Paolo Vittori and 8 by Meneghin. The
second game in Italy was a blowout victory, 108-73,
as Jones scored 36 points.
CSKA, the defending champ, awaited in the final.
The Russian team had defeated Madrid in the previous
final in an epic 50-minute game in Barcelona, 103-
99. The two group games ended up with each team
winning one, and the final duel in Sarajevo, on April
9, would break the tie - and also name a new champ.
Ignis won 79-74 behind a great Meneghin with 20
points and a great Raga with 19. Sergei Belov netted
21 points for CSKA. It was the second European title
for Italian basketball after Milan’s triumph in 1966
over Slavia Prague.
One year later, CSKA got its revenge and won in
Amberes, 67-53, but in 1972 Varese brought back
the title by defeating Jugoplastika in Tel Aviv, 70-69.
The third title from its fourth straight final arrived on
March 22, 1973, in Liege, Belgium. Ignis again defeat-
Aleksandar Nikolic
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Vladimir Stankovic
ed CSKA 71-66 with 25 points by Raga and 16 by Bob
Morse, who also finished the Italian League as top
scorer with 31.5 points. It was another on the endless
list of duels between Nikolic and Gomelskiy, great rivals
at both the club and international levels.
For the 1973-74 season, Nikolic was back in Yugoslavia
with Crvena Zvezda. To maintain his winning
tradition, he took the Saporta Cup in Udine, where
Zvezda beat Spartak Brno 86-75 behind the great
trio of Dragan Kapicic (23 points), Zoran Slavnic (20)
and Ljubodrag Simonovic (19). The Czechs also had
a great team with Jan Bobrovsky (20) and Kamil Brabenec
(14), plus Frantisek Konvicka on the bench.
Nikolic spent the following two years with Fortitudo
Bologna, but he was back to the Yugoslavia bench
in 1976-77. During his first stint, he had won two
EuroBasket silver medals, one bronze and was also a
finalist at the World Cup, but he was missing a gold.
In the space of two years he now won two of them, at
the 1977 EuroBasket in Liege (74-61 over the USSR)
and at the 1978 World Cup in Manila, where Yugoslavia
edged the USSR, with Gomelskiy as his rival, 82-81
after overtime.
What happened next surprised everybody: Nikolic
was fresh off a gold medal at the World Cup when he
went to Cacak to coach Borac. Cacak was a city with
tradition and great players like Radmilo Misovic and
Dragan Kicanovic, but the team didn’t have the level
expected for a figure like Nikolic on the bench. However,
he managed to put the team into the Korac Cup and
discovered a young guard named Zeljko Obradovic.
From Borac, Nikolic went back to Italy (Virtus,
Venezia, Scavolini, Udine) before, in the mid-1980s,
he finally left the bench. But he never truly left basketball.
He did, though, leave an impressive roll of honors
behind him: three European crowns with Ignis Varese,
three Italian Leagues crowns with Varese, three Italian
Cups with the same team, plus two Intercontinental
Cups (and all of that came only between 1970 and
1973). In Yugoslavia, he won the national cup in 1962
and the league in 1963 with OKK Belgrade, and with
the Yugoslav national team he was EuroBasket champ
in 1977, finalist in 1961 and 1965, and third in 1963.
He also won a silver medal at the 1963 World Cup and
gold in 1978.
Top-notch consultant
It is widely believed Bogdan Tanjevic first called
Nikolic to be a consultant in the mid-1980s, but in fact
he had already done so at Partizan. In an Italian tour
for the team in 1983, young coach Borislav Dzakovic
had the Professor as a consultant. Zeljko Obradovic,
still a Cacak player, was sent on loan to Partizan for
this tour. After a game in which he played 38 minutes
but scored just 2 points, the youthful Obradovic was
disappointed. But Nikolic congratulated him, telling
him he was the best player on the team.
“That day I learned forever that for a point guard,
it’s not important how many points he scores,” Obradovic
later said.
After working with Tanjevic in Milan, Nikolic accepted
an invitation from Boza Maljkovic to help him with
some young talent at Jugoplastika. The results are
well-known, as the team managed to lift the European
title three times in a row from 1989 to 1991. The next
person to knock at his door was Obradovic, in his debut
season as a coach with Partizan in 1991-92. The
result? Partizan was crowned European champion in
1992 in Istanbul.
Nikolic had a reputation for being pessimistic, but
that is not true: false pessimism and critique of his players
was simply his way of motivating them. He wasn’t
interested in mediocrity, and he was almost a perfectionist,
a master of combining talent with discipline. In
practices he always kept a distance from his players, but
in private he even played cards with some of them.
In 1998, he was inducted to the Basketball Hall
of Fame in Springfield, and then in 2007 he received
the same honor from the FIBA Hall of Fame, but that
came seven years after his death on March 12, 2000.
At his funeral, Maljkovic called Nikolic the patriarch of
Serbian basketball. He was buried at the “Alley of the
Greats” in Belgrade, just like his assistant and heir at
the Yugoslavia national team bench, Zeravica, who
passed away in 2015.
In 2016, the mythical Pionir Hall in Belgrade was
renamed in The Professor‘s honor. Now, the biggest
games in the Serbian capital are played in Aleksandar
Nikolic Hall.
Aleksandar Nikolic
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