Gašper Vidmar

Gašper Vidmar
Player information
birthday	September 14, 1987
place of birth	Ljubljana, SFR Yugoslavia
size	211 cm
position	center
Club information
society	Banvit BK
league	Türkiye Basketbol Ligi
Jersey number	14th
Clubs as active
2003–2005 Janče STZ 2005–2007 KD Geoplin Slovan 2007–2014 Fenerbahçe Ülker 2009–2010 → KK Union Olimpija 2012–2013 → Beşiktaş JK 2014–2015 Darüşşafaka Doğuş Since 2015 Banvit BK 0
National team
Since 02006	Slovenia

Gašper Vidmar (born September 14, 1987 in Ljubljana , SR Slovenia ) is a Slovenian basketball player . The national player and world and European championship participant moved to Turkey at the age of 20 in 2007 , where he has been playing for clubs in the top Turkish division Türkiye Basketbol Ligi with a one-year break . With his long-time club Fenerbahçe Ülker, Vidmar won four Turkish championships. In Turkey and Slovenia he won the national cup competition with his clubs and was also named Most Valuable Player (MVP) of the All-Star Games 2009 and the 2010 Cup competition in Slovenia . Since the 2015/16 season, Vidmar has been playing for Banvit BK in Bandırma for the first time in Turkey, not for an Istanbul club, but at the Sea of ​​Marmara .

Career

Vidmar played in his youth for the second capital club Slovan in his hometown, which is, however, in the shadow of the record champions Olimpija. However, he played his first senior games with the men at the age of 16 for the lower-class suburb club from Janče, before returning to the first-class men's team of Slovan after two years in 2005. At the U20 European Junior Championship finals in 2006, the Slovenian junior selection, led by the triumvirate Emir Preldžić , Jaka Klobučar and Vidmar, all born in 1987 , surprisingly won the bronze medal and was considered the record winner and host at the sixth edition of this competition a year later as one of the top favorites as it was again led by these three players. After the narrow opening victory against defending champion Serbia, the team only reached third place in the three-way comparison of the intermediate round and missed the semifinals after the only tournament defeat against Russia. After the fifth Klobučar and Vidmar were then national coach Ales Pipan straight to the championship finals of the men taken while in Bosnia -born Preldžić stayed at home and eventually took the Turkish nationality. After the European Championship finals for men, in which Vidmar achieved seventh place with his teammates in three short-minute missions, he moved to the with Preldžić, with whom he had also played at Slovan for the last two years and had at least one runner-up in 2006 Turkish champion Fenerbahçe Ülker to Istanbul .

With champion Fenerbahçe, Vidmar also played in the highest-ranking European club competition ULEB Euroleague . After the play-off quarter-finals in 2008 , they were eliminated in the group stage of the 16 best teams in 2009 after only one intermediate round victory. After defending the title in the national championship in 2008, coach Bogdan Tanjević also lost the final series of the 2009 championship against local rivals and record champions Efes Pilsen SK . At the beginning of the 2009/10 season, Vidmar first returned to his Slovenian homeland and was loaned to record champions Union Olimpija, with whom he only achieved a preliminary round win in ten games in the ULEB Euroleague 2009/10 and was eliminated from the competition early with this team . For the national double winner of the previous season, however, it was enough to defend his title in the cup competition, in which Vidmar was awarded as an MVP as in the Slovenian All-Star Game , and in the supranational Adriatic Basketball League 2009/10 to make it into the Final Four tournament. Even before this final tournament, Vidmar was recalled by Fenerbahçe to Turkey at the beginning of April and Olimpija also missed another championship with Klobučar, while Vidmar, together with Preldžić, among others, was able to recapture the Turkish title from Efes Pilsen in a final series revenge. At the 2010 World Cup in his adopted country of Turkey, Vidmar was again represented in the Slovenian national squad and the selection only lost in the preliminary round to the superior title winner United States . After winning the round of 16 over Australia , however, they lost significantly against the host and eventual finalist Turkey, trained by Tanjević . After the following defeats in the placement games, the Slovenes finished eighth with Vidmar.

Under the new club coach Neven Spahija , Fenerbahçe was able to defend the double success from 2011, but after a good preliminary round in the ULEB Euroleague 2010/11 , the team failed because of the poor direct comparison to reach the quarter-final play-offs of the most important European club competition . In the following season, however, the direct comparison in the ULEB Euroleague 2011/12 was enough to win the group in the preliminary round before the eventual title winner Olympiacos Piraeus , but this did not save the team from the last group place in the intermediate round of the 16 best teams. Also in the national championship they were eliminated as fifth in the quarter-finals against local rivals Beşiktaş, who won the national double from Fenerbahçe. After the due change of coach at Fenerbahçe, Vidmar was loaned again, this time to the champion and cup winner Beşiktaş. With this it was enough in the ULEB Euroleague 2012/13 after, among other things, two preliminary round victories against the then German champion Brose Baskets to move into the extended intermediate round , in which, however, after only two wins in 14 games, they finished bottom of the group behind Fenerbahçe. As the national defending champion, Beşiktaş lost sixth in the main round in the first play-off round for the championship against Banvit BK. At the European Championship finals in 2013 , Slovenia hosted under coach Božidar Maljković , but after losing the quarter-finals to eventual title winners France , they only managed to finish fifth after two wins in the placement round. Under the new club coach Željko Obradović , Vidmar returned to Fenerbahçe in 2013, but after a knee injury in February 2014, Vidmar was hardly involved in winning the national championship again and did not get a new contract.

For the 2014/15 season, Vidmar moved within Istanbul to the ambitious first division returnee Darüşşafaka Doğuş, with whom he reached the national championship play-offs in third place, but in which they surprisingly failed in the first round due to Trabzonspor . While the club continued to upgrade and signed Vidmar's long-time teammate Preldžić, Vidmar moved to the other bank of the Sea of Marmara to Banvit BK in Bandırma , who had also been eliminated in the first round against the eventual title winner Pınar Karşıyaka . With this team he reached the intermediate round of the 32 best teams in the Eurocup 2015/16 , in which one meets the two German teams FC Bayern Munich and ratiopharm Ulm .

Web links

• VIDMAR, GASPER - Player profile on the website of the Euro League ( English )
• Vidmar, Gašper - Turkish Basketball League Player - Profile on the statistics pages of TBLStat.net (English / Turkish)
• Gašper Vidmar - Overview of participation in international FIBA tournaments on archive.fiba.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Slovenia grave bronze medal. FIBA Europa , July 23, 2006, accessed January 4, 2016 (English, match report). 
2. ↑ Russia Break Slovenia Hearts. FIBA Europa , July 12, 2007, accessed on January 4, 2016 (English, match report).