On Friday night at 21:00 (ERT1 and Novasports Start), the heart of Greek basketball will beat strongly.

Our National Team plays its biggest game in the last 15 years, and everyone is looking forward to the battle against Turkey, which will determine this year’s Eurobasket finalist – a guarantee of a medal, something absent from Greek basketball since September 2009.

The drought has been due to many factors, sometimes internal, sometimes competitive, but now our internationals have two huge chances for distinction ahead of them, and they will not let them slip away easily.

Giannis’s missed opportunities

In recent tournaments, the National Team had the will and the goal, but often lacked the deep roster, or fell against giants in the “cursed” quarterfinals and was eliminated.

It is widely agreed that it would be a great shame to have Giannis Antetokounmpo, perhaps the best player in the world, on your roster and fail to win a distinction.

Giannis began playing for the National Team in 2014, at age 20, in the World Cup in Spain, where Serbia tripped Greece in the Round of 16.

The following season, Spain eliminated Greece in the Eurobasket 2015 quarterfinals. In 2017 he was absent due to knee surgery, and in 2019 at the World Cup the team was knocked out in the Round of 16.

The milestone tournament for Giannis came in 2022. Already an NBA champion with the Bucks, in the most mature phase of his career, he felt it was his time for a medal.

He was the tournament’s top scorer by far, and everything pointed to success for the National Team – until the fateful quarterfinal. There, Germany with Schröder and Wagner destroyed Dimitris Itoudis’s team with incredible three-point shooting, sinking Giannis’s medal dreams.

Optimism returned when, with Vassilis Spanoulis on the bench, the National Team not only qualified for the Paris Olympics but also reached the quarterfinals – only for the unbeatable Germany to eliminate Greece once again.

In this year’s tournament, Giannis Antetokounmpo appears more determined than ever, with eyes gleaming as they reflect the “silverware” the Greek Freak has sought for over a decade.

If 2022 was his most mature stage, now he resembles a Shaolin monk, seeing only the target ahead, every obstacle nothing more than a passing interruption.

The pinnacle of this was Valančiūnas’s unsportsmanlike foul to his neck in the quarterfinal against Lithuania – Giannis didn’t even look at the massive Lithuanian center, he calmly went to shoot his free throws. Focus at its highest point.

Giannis is now the last of the great NBAers left in the tournament, the only representative of the old generation of big stars – now challenged by Alperen Şengün, Franz Wagner, and Lauri Markkanen, semifinal opponents.

Giannis will do it for Luka and Nikola, who exited the tournament earlier, but above all for Greece and for himself.

The “last dance” of Sloukas and Papanikolaou

Beyond Giannis, two athletes who have lived through countless tournaments with the Greek National Team – and of course its failures – are Kostas Sloukas and Kostas Papanikolaou.

They belong to the golden generation of the 1990s, which swept medals in youth competitions and was once seen as the hope of Greek basketball.

Bogris, Mantzaris, Pappas, Sarikopoulos, Kaselakis, and Jankovic completed that remarkable generation, which ultimately remained only with youth-level successes.

Sloukas and Papanikolaou are its last representatives and, by all indications, are competing for the final time with the National Team. Both at 35, they know this is their last major chance for distinction wearing the national emblem.

The two are leaders on and off the court. Sloukas has said that even though he has played dozens of big games at club level, the semifinal against Turkey is the greatest challenge of his career. He admitted he feels like a rookie – but he also has the experience to handle it.

On the other hand, Papanikolaou appeared emotional after the great win against Lithuania, saying he felt blessed to be in this position.

Papanikolaou and Sloukas started together in the National Team at Eurobasket 2011, with Papanikolaou even in the preliminary squad in 2009. In 2011 they finished 6th, followed by two Round of 16 exits in 2013 and 2014, while in 2015 and 2017 the dreams ended in the quarterfinals.

The Olympiacos captain has not missed a single tournament with the National Team since 2011, while Sloukas missed the 2023 World Cup and the 2024 Olympics. That’s 12 out of 12 for “Pap,” 10 out of 12 for “Slouky Luke.”

In 2022, they too were part of the bitter loss to Germany in the quarterfinals, and now they are ready to take their revenge – first for themselves and second for their golden generation. As Sloukas said, the two of them will leave a legacy for the generations to come.