Dino Rađa Inducted into Basketball Hall of Fame

The Croatian basketball and sports legend has achieved basketball’s highest honor. 

Dino Rađa became a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Illinois on Friday, reports Gol.hr on September 7, 2018. 

Rađa has thus become the fourth Croatian to be honored with this most prestigious achievement in basketball after Krešimir Ćosić, Dražen Petrović, and Mirko Novosel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v=dzu1A5IqOyY

Rađa was born on April 24, 1967, in Split, whose basketball story began at Gripe where he wrote history with Jugoplastika, winning three Yugoslavian championship titles in 1988, 1989 and 1990, and the Yugoslav Basketball Cup in 1990.

In 1989, Jugoplastika defeated Barcelona in the Final Four, followed by Maccabi for the European title. In both games, Rađa was the key player for Jugoplastika. Years later in Zaragoza, Jugoplastika overcame Barcelona again for yet another European title.

In 1990, Rađa transferred from Split to Il Messaggero in Rome where he was the best paid European basketball player – his transfer was compared to Diego Maradona’s from Barcelona to Napoli by Italian journalists. Rađa remained in Rome for three years and, after winning the  Radivoj Korać Cup in 1993, went to the NBA league to play for the Boston Celtics.

Because injuries halted Dino in the strongest league in the world, in 1997, he returned to Europe, to Greek Panathinaikos, from which he returned to the Croatian league in 1999. He played for Zadar for a year and continued onto Zagreb’s Cibona and Olympiakos. At the end of his career, Rađa returned home to Gripe in Split and won the title of Croatian champion in 2003. It was the first title for Jugoplastika since Croatia became independent. After leaving Gripe, Rađa was the president of KK Split for several years.

Rađa won the silver medal at the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988 as a representative of Yugoslavia, and as a member of the Croatian national team, he won the Olympic silver in Barcelona in 1992. 

At the 1990 World Championships in Buenos Aires, Rađa won the gold medal, and in Toronto in 1994 in the Croatia jersey, he won the bronze medal.

Rađa participated in five basketball European championships – as a representative of Yugoslavia he won the bronze medal in 1987 in Athens, the gold in 1989 in Zagreb and 1991 in Rome, and as a representative of Croatia, he won bronze medals at the European championships in 1993 in Munich and 1995 in Athens.

Rađa was a representative of Yugoslavia from 1987 to 1991 and of Croatia from 1992 to 1996 and performed at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Rađa was awarded a number of sports awards – in 1989 he was named the best basketball player in the country by Sportskih novosti and Nedjeljne Dalmacije. He was chosen in the first five of the 1993 European championships in Munich and in the 1994 World Cup in Toronto, he won the State Franjo Bučar State Award for Sport as a member of the national team in 1992 and individually in 2003, was awarded the Red Danica Croatia, and since 2010, he has been honored in Split’s Sports Hall of Fame. 

In 2008, Rađa was included among the 50 basketball players who contributed most to the development of the Euroliga, and in a survey of the largest specialized Greek basketball portal Eurohoops in 2015, he was among the top 15 European basketball players of all time.

Two Silver Olympic medals, three European club titles, numerous medals at the world and European championships and many other accolades, congratulations to you, Dino Rađa. 

 

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