Step Back NBA, Euroleague is the True King of Basketball Pettiness

Euroleague
Aaron Jackson in Euroleague action for CSKA. Photo Credit: Mikhail Serbin, Getty Images.

Pettiness in the NBA has been a topic of discussion this whole season. From Kevin Durant leaving OKC and his beloved bro for the already incredible Golden State Warriors, to Washington and Boston having a petty series that has extended even off the court, the NBA is at an all-time high for pettiness. It hasn’t even stopped with the 450 players currently in the Leauge. Even the Celtics championship winning big three of Rajon Rondo, Kevin Garnett and Paul Pierce have reignited old problems with Ray Allen.

NBA pettiness is great, but theLleague is always in the spotlight which means players are always being watched. While social media legends Joel Embiid and Chandler Parsons may beg to differ, players have to truly monitor how they behave.

However, a league does exist that isn’t in the spotlight. That league is Euroleague. Since Euroleague doesn’t have that spotlight, there is more insanity, savagery, and pettiness all around. So I now present you, the Euroleague Petty Wars.

Bobby Dixon Faces Jordan Theodore, Hilarity Ensues

Okay, this isn’t actually Euroleague. It’s actually Turkish Basketball Super League. But regardless of what professional league this is, it’s ultimate pettiness.

Fenerbahce faced off against Banvit in regular season action and for a good part of the game, Bobby Dixon and Jordan Theodore were matched-up with each other. Theodore is one of the leading scorers in the TBSL, averaging 18.75 points per game. However, Theodore didn’t play like a leading scorer when Dixon was guarding him though.

Dixon locked up Theodore better than Shawshank Prison locked up Andy Dufresne. He held him to 7 points on 1/8  shooting and they both talked their fair share of trash during the game as well. After the game, Bobby Dixon decided to continue the trash talk on twitter with a subtweet—something I hadn’t seen since I was in high school and every relationship ended over social media.

 

 

Dixon told Theodore that the continental basketball competition he plays in, Basketball Champions League—which he mistakenly called Euro Challenge—, basically has traffic cones for defenders. He then called himself an Elite Euroleague defender, which is a stretch for even a used car salesmen, and said that Theodore can’t handle elite Euroleague defenders.

The trash talk didn’t stop there. Theodore is a man so he defended himself and fired back, without a subtweet.

 

 

The boy you trash response is so simple that I would love it if it wasn’t actually Theodore who had played like trash in the game.

Theodore tweeted at Dixon again after that, effectively ruining the simplicity of the boy you trash response, and ruining the moment. This made it clear that Theodore’s trash talk game was way worse than the game that started it in the first place.

 

 

This comeback could turn out to be incredibly epic because Fenerbahce and Banvit may face off in the second round of the playoffs of the TBSL. If they both win their first round playoff series,  we will most likely have our second edition of the Dixon vs Theodore saga.

It didn’t stop at that though. Dixon retweeted the second tweet from Theodore, and then replied:

 

 

With this tweet, Dixon officially won the battle on the court, and on the internet.

Dixon’s initial tweet was so good, that it started small trash talk between two other players over social media. Mike James quoted the tweet and responded with the same responses I send to my friends when they post a picture with a girl on their Snapchat story.

 

 

This led to CSKA Moscow point guard Aaron Jackson trash talking James.

 

 

Which of course wasn’t going to go unanswered.

 

 

Imagine this whole thing in a bar. Dixon and Theodore are out on the dance floor doing their thing but have a small history with each other. They spend the whole night giving each other dirty looks and then eventually they walk by one another, intentionally bump into each other and start fighting. It’s a solid fight but the bouncers grab them and throw them out. James was standing with a friend in the corner of the dance floor (he tweeted in a Q&A that he doesn’t dance) and just said to a friend, “wow you saw that?” Then that’s when Jackson just comes out of nowhere and says, “yeah I saw it, you got a problem with it? Then say what’s up then.” And James just said, “bro what I don’t even know you chill out.”

And that’s this whole petty incident translated from Twitter to a bar setting.

Dixon is clearly the king of Euroleague basketball pettiness when it comes to individual players, but his team, Fenerbahce, isn’t.  It’s actually James’s team, Panathinaikos, that is.

Pettiness From Athens to Istanbul and Back

In the Euroleague Playoffs, Panathinaikos faced Fenerbahce in the first round and had home court advantage. There was a pretty solid story line to this. Fenerbahce’s head coach, Zeljko Obradovic, became a Euroleague legend as a coach with Panathinaikos. He won five Euroleague titles with the club and then in 2013 he jumped ship for Fenerbahce.

With Obradovic’s success with Panathinaikos, he turned their home court—the OAKA—into a fortress. It was such a powerful home court that Obradovic had never been able to manage a win there since leaving the club. This didn’t bode well for Fenerbahce as Panathinaikos had home court advantage for their series with Fenerbahce.

But then something crazy happened; Fenerbahce swept Panathinaikos. They won the first two games in Athens and then came back home and won Game 3 in Istanbul to end the series. This was the first time this had ever happened since Euroleague switched to playoff series for the 2004-05 season.

Euroleague
OAKA Olympic Indoor Hall in Athens. Photo Credit: BGBasket

This culmination of events was embarrassing for Panathinaikos. They didn’t show any fight in the series, appearing to just roll over and quit on games even when they were at home and had sold-out support from their fans. With that being noted, their club owner, Dimitris Giannakopoulos decided to start a civil petty war.

Giannakopoulos canceled every player’s ticket for the flight back to Athens from Istanbul and set-up a team bus ride for return instead. The flight is usually about 80 minutes long to go from Istanbul to Athens while the bus ride is about 11-plus hours. The coaching staff and most players accepted this form of punishment and got on the bus.

However, some of the players decided to have a petty response. James, Chris Singleton, Kenny Gabriel and Antonis Fostis decided to just buy their own plane tickets instead. This was a pretty big F you to Giannakopoulos as the players basically said, “it doesn’t matter who buys the plane ticket, whether it’s you or us, the ticket is being bought with your money.”

Giannakopoulos didn’t take too kindly this and not only did he threaten to fine the players, he threatened to WAIVE THEM FROM THE TEAM. That would have been the pettiest thing in the history of professional sports.

Sadly, the petty civil war ended there. The players were not waived, nor were they fined. Giannakopoulos came to his senses and realized if he wanted his team to have any shot at hoisting the Greek A1 League Trophy, he needed to keep these players.

But even with the abrupt and non-dramatic ending to this petty civil war. This was some of the pettiest behavior professional basketball has ever seen, and the Euroleague is full of it. It may be a while before the NBA starts to catch up.

 

 

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