A Lithuanian Basketball Star

by Sam Toperoff | The Atlantic Monthly Co. | July 1986 v258 p74 


A LITHUANIAN BASKETBALL STAR 

AVERY FEW AMERICAN professional stars excepted, the best basketball 
player in the world is probably a seven-foot-three Lithuanian named 
Arvidas Sabonis, who is, at twenty-one, the center and the backbone 
of an excellent Soviet National team that has won virtually every 
international amateur tournament it has entered in the past three 
years. Because the Soviet Union boycotted the 1984 Olympics in Los 
Angeles, most American fans have had little opportunity to see just 
how good the Russian players, especially Sabonis, really are. 

Last winter, however, Ted Turner and Soyuzsport, the Soviet sports 
council, signed an agreement to televise worldwide the Federation 
Internationale de Basketball Amateur (FIBA) World Championship for 
Men, in Spain, as part of the Goodwill Games package, most of which 
will originate in Moscow this month. So Sabonis and his teammates 
will be seen in the United States this summer, on the Turner cable 
network. The Russians, mostly because of Sabonis's presence, are 
heavily favored to win the tournament. 

The FIBA Championship does not have a single-elimination format. 
The twenty-four national amateur teams that were invited have been 
divided into four pools of six teams each. After every team plays 
every other team in its pool, the three top teams in each pool 
advance. According to the seedings, the three strongest teams--
Russia, the United States, and Spain--have weak opposition within 
their pools and are likely to move into the round of twelve 
undefeated. The United States and Italy, another strong team, are 
in the same pool, and must play one another early, giving the loser 
almost no chance to win the championship. Should the U.S. team win 
its pool, its chances for success in the tournament will probably 
depend on its beating the Russians, most likely in the final round 
of four teams. All of this assumes, of course, that the U.S. team, 
ignoring a climate of apprehension about terrorism, holds firm in 
its decision to compete. 

The few Americans who have seen Sabonis play in recent years, 
mostly professional scouts and college coaches, recount feats of 
agility and marksmanship that sound all but superhuman. Pete Newell, 
the director of player personnel for the Golden State Warriors of 
the National Basketball Association, and a man widely respected for 
his acute evaluations of the skills at the center position, is 
lavish in his praise of Sabonis. "He could conceivably become the 
greatest player in the game,' Newell says. "At seven-three, he is as 
naturally gifted as any player I've ever seen, and he conducts 
himself like a very athletic forward. He has tremendous hands and a 
physique made to order for basketball. If he had played for an 
American team last year, I'd have drafted him before Patrick Ewing.' 
(The seven-foot Ewing was the first collegiate player selected in 
last year's NBA draft, and so coveted were his talents that the 
league instituted an unprecedented lottery for first pick in the 
draft among the seven teams with the poorest records. The New York 
Knickerbockers won the right to sign Ewing and agreed to pay him the 
largest salary ever earned by an NBA player in his first professional 
season.) 

Newell says, "I saw Sabonis make an unforgettable play last year in a 
tournament in Hiroshima, Japan. A rebound bounced high off the rim 
and over toward the corner. Sabonis went up for it way out there, 
took the ball in one hand and--still up in the air, off balance-- 
swept the ball backhand, like a discus thrower in reverse, and hit a 
teammate in stride downcourt eighty-six feet away for an easy layup. 
I'd never seen a play like it. The only problem with Sabonis is that 
he'll never have an opportunity to play against the best 
professionals in the world, unless of course he defects to the United 
States.' 

Guiding the American team in Spain this summer is Lute Olson, the 
basketball coach at the University of Arizona. Olson has seen Sabonis 
and the Soviet Nationals on a number of occasions and knows that the 
American team, made up of the best available collegians, will be hard 
pressed to stay with them. He says, "I saw Sabonis last year in the 
finals of a tournament in Dieppe, France. His team was way ahead, and 
he made three plays that to me were just unbelievable. Three times he 
took defensive rebounds, led the fast break downcourt, pulled up, and 
hit three-point shots.' (In international competition three points 
are awarded for any shot made beyond an arc 6.25 meters, or twenty 
feet, six inches, from the basket, as opposed to twenty-three feet, 
nine inches in the NBA.) Olson also has a very high regard for 
Sabonis's excellent and internationally experienced supporting cast. 
Alexandr Belostenny, twenty-seven years old, is another seven-foot-
three player; he is less mobile than Sabonis but is an effective 
rebounder and scorer from in close. Like most Eastern European teams, 
the Russians are extremely accurate at long-range shooting: the 
guards Valdis Valters and Voldemaras Khomichus, both twenty-seven, 
are outstanding three-point shooters. Olson says, "Seven or eight 
years ago the Russians were so mechanical on the court, we could beat 
them with superior quickness. And that is still our basic advantage, 
but our edge has been lessened considerably. We have our work cut out 
for us.' 

Newell, in his capacity as talent adviser for Golden State, has kept 
track of the young player's development since Sabonis first came to 
the United States, with the Soviet Nationals in 1982, for a twelve-
game tour against American college teams. Sabonis, then eighteen, was 
a member of the Junior National team but played with the seniors for 
experience. During the tour Sabonis led the Soviets with an average 
of eighteen points and nine rebounds, while playing twenty-seven 
minutes per game. The Russians won nine and lost three. In a game 
televised nationally on CBS, Sabonis led his team to victory over 
Indiana University, prompting the Indiana coach, Bobby Knight, who 
coached the victorious Olympic team in 1984, to say of him, "He may 
be the best non-American player I've ever seen.' 

Sabonis's best performance on American soil was against Ralph 
Sampson, who is seven-four, at the University of Virginia three days 
after the Indiana game. Sampson had thirteen points and twenty-five 
rebounds. Sabonis, who fouled out, scored twenty-one points and took 
down fourteen rebounds. Bill Wall, the executive director of the 
Amateur Basketball Association of the U.S.A., who accompanied the 
Russians on the tour, says, "Sabonis clearly outplayed Sampson in 
that game.' Sampson was the first player selected in the NBA draft at 
the end of the 1982-1983 collegiate season. 

IN THE FOUR YEARS since that American tour Sabonis has improved 
significantly, but his potential has not been truly tested. The young 
centers of the NBA play regularly against veterans like Kareem Abdul-
Jabbar, Moses Malone, and Bill Walton; such competition sharpens 
their skills. Sabonis is rarely challenged by players of comparable 
ability. "That's a problem,' Newell says. Because the opposition 
Sabonis meets inside Russia is not challenging to him, he sometimes 
gets lazy. In the big international tournaments like the one coming 
up in Spain, he'll be fine, but he doesn't play with the intensity he 
should, night after night, like Larry Bird. I'd like to see him in 
the NBA, just to see how great he'd be if he were pushed to the limit 
all the time.' 

Ted Turner would also like to see Sabonis in the NBA someday soon: 
his own team, the Atlanta Hawks, selected the Russian star in the 
fourth round of last year's draft (Sabonis was the seventy-seventh 
player chosen). Surprisingly, at that time neither Mike Fratello, the 
Atlanta coach, nor Stan Kasten, the team's general manager, had ever 
seen Sabonis play, leading some suspicious NBA executives to 
speculate that Turner had made a reciprocal deal with Soyuzsport, 
arranging for Sabonis's services in exchange for bringing Moscow's 
Goodwill Games to the world. Whether the Hawks really would own the 
professional rights to Arvidas Sabonis remains in question, since 
they drafted him before his twenty-second birthday, something the 
league forbids unless a player declares his willingness or his desire 
to be drafted. The Atlanta selection was neither mysterious nor 
sinister, according to Marty Blake, the director of scouting for the 
NBA, whose office evaluates the professional potential of every 
promising basketball player in the world. Blake says, "Atlanta didn't 
have to see Sabonis. Would you have had to see Ewing to know he was 
the best player eligible last year? Of course not. Sabonis is in the 
same class as Ewing, but worth a fourth-round pick just in case he 
ever did decide to play here. All you'd have to know is that the "Big 
A' is the best amateur basketball player in the world, the most 
complete big man around.' 

Bill Walton, of the Boston Celtics, the league's Most Valuable Player 
in 1978, is one of the few NBA centers who have seen Sabonis 
firsthand. He admires Sabonis's game, which he saw most recently at 
the June, 1985, European Championship, a tournament that the Russian 
team won handily. "Even though I've never actually played against the 
man,' Walton says, "every time I've seen him play he's been awesome. 
I don't understand why some team just doesn't give him a million 
dollars and get him over here. Sabonis would be a star in the NBA 
right away. I can't think of one guy in the league who reminds me of 
Sabonis --he can do it all.' 

Sabonis seems to make the winning difference wherever he plays. He 
plays in the Russian League for Kaunas, a Lithuanian city of 400,000 
which last year won the Division I Championship, upsetting Red Army 
of Moscow, the perennial champions. "According to my information,' 
Newell says, "it was in Lithuania that he first saw NBA games [on 
television]. They picked them up from Finland. He modeled his game on 
Abdul-Jabbar's, and you can see it in his shooting touch, but he can 
do so many other things. In fact, he does one thing I've never seen 
before: he catches passes in the post with one hand. With the other 
he checks his defensive man. Then he pivots whichever way the 
defensive pressure dictates.' 

MOST EXPERTS DO not give the American team more than an outside 
chance to win the World Championship in Spain. The Russian team has 
much more international experience together: its key players, with 
the exception of Sabonis, were on the team that defeated the United 
States by a point to win the previous FIBA Championship, in Cali, 
Colombia, in 1982. Now that Sabonis has joined them, the American 
task becomes extremely difficult. 

But not impossible, according to Steve Alford, who has played against 
Sabonis and the Russians. His Indiana University team lost twice to 
the Russians (by twenty points each time) during a tour of Japan last 
summer; nonetheless, Alford later compared them unfavorably with the 
1984 U.S. Olympic champions, a team of which Alford was also a member. 
"We'd have a killed them,' he said. "There's no way these guys would 
have stopped Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins, Patrick Ewing, Wayman 
Tisdale, and the guys we had inside --not as careless as the Russians 
are.' Carelessness is a quality rarely attributed to the Russians, 
but if Alford is correct, the U.S. team may win after all. Although 
it does not have players of the caliber Alford named, the players we 
do have are not many cuts below. 

The United States' best chance for victory probably will come from 
playing what Mike Fratello describes as "the American style.' "When a 
kid grows up in an American schoolyard or playground, he picks up all 
sorts of things that cannot be taught: a certain spin of the ball 
against the backboard, all kinds of whirling dribble moves--a feeling 
for the game, an instinctive knowledge of what is possible in certain 
situations. It's as though American players develop a sixth sense out 
there. European players, good as they've gotten, still have that 
mechanical quality about them.' 

The Russians won't be able to match the Americans' overall quickness 
and ability to improvise. But whether a team with these skills can 
prevail against a team that excels in tactical correctness and 
technical execution remains to be seen. What makes Arvidas Sabonis a 
remarkable player among the Russians, however, is precisely his 
ability to play an American game like an American. 




Much thanks to Craig Wilson and CFFI...