Jurij Zdovc

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Jurij Zdovc
Player information
Nickname	Jure
birthday	December 13, 1966 (53 years and 262 days)
place of birth	Maribor , SFR Yugoslavia
position	Point guard
Clubs as active
1983–1991 Olimpija Ljubljana 1991–1992 Knorr Bologna 1992–1993 CSP Limoges 1993–1996 Iraklis Thessaloniki 1997 Paris Basket Racing 1997 Tofaş SK Bursa 1998–2000 Olimpija Ljubljana 2000–2001 Panionios Athens 2001–2002 Olimpija Ljubljana 2002 KD Geoplin Slovan 2003 KK Split 00000 00000 00000 00000
National team
1986-1991 1992-2001	Yugoslavia Slovenia	83 57
Clubs as coaches
1997–1998 Comet Slovenske Konjice ( AC ) 2003 KK Krka Novo mesto (AC) 2003–2004 KK Split 2004 KD Geoplin Slovan 2005–2006 Iraklis Saloniki 2006–2007 Olimpija Ljubljana ( GM ) 2007–2008 KK Bosna Sarajevo 2008–2009 Slovenia 2008 –2011 Olimpija Ljubljana 2011–2013 BK Spartak Saint Petersburg Since 2013 Royal Halı Gaziantep 00000 00000 0 0 0

Jurij Zdovc medal table
Basketball (men)
Yugoslavia
Olympic games
silver	1988 Seoul
World championships
gold	1990 Buenos Aires
European championships
gold	1989 Zagreb
gold	1991 Rome

Jurij Zdovc (born December 13, 1966 in Maribor , SR Slovenia ) is a Slovenian basketball coach and former player. As a player, Zdovc, whose first name is usually abbreviated with Jure , won the World Cup and two European Championships in 1990 with the Yugoslav selection, and the silver medal at the Olympic Games in 1988 . He also won the European Champion Clubs' Cup with CSP Limoges in 1993 . As a coach, Zdovc has won a national championship each in Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina .

At the beginning of 2008, Jurij 'Jure' Zdovc belonged to a group of 105 basketball players who were nominated by the Euroleague basketball and / or basketball enthusiasts to determine fifty important figures in basketball in Europe , active in the period 1958 to 2008 and subsequently in May 2008 in Madrid ( Spain ). All nominated players played a particularly prominent role in the European Cup competitions of FIBA Europe and the Euroleague basketball and were each among the particularly prominent "stars" of their national league teams.

Player career

1983 Zdovc won as a team with, among others, Luka Pavicevic and Zarko Paspalj the Cadets (U17) European Championship of Yugoslavia and subsequently joined the basketball club Comet from Slovenske Konjice , where he had learned to play basketball, the Slovenian top club KK Union Olimpija in the capital Ljubljana the former republic. He played there until 1991 , the year the wars in Yugoslavia broke out. With the Yugoslav national basketball team, Zdovc won the silver medal at the 1988 Olympic Games when they lost to the Soviet selection in the final. At the following European and World Championships, you almost walked to the tournament victory. With the exception of a defeat in the preliminary round at the 1990 World Cup against Puerto Rico , they won all games at EM 1989, World Cup 1990 & EM 1991 by at least seven points. The 1991 European Championship was supposed to be the last joint tournament of a Yugoslav team, as the war of independence broke out in Slovenia. Zdovc was forced by the Slovenian government to cancel the EM 1991 in Rome before the semi-finals. He then stayed in Italy and moved to Virtus in Bologna in the A1 series .

After a year, Zdovc moved to the French club Cercle Saint-Pierre in Limoges in 1992 . The club had previously signed the successful Serbian coach Božidar Maljković , who had won two European championships with KK Split. In a team with Michael Young , Jim Bilba and Richard Dacoury , among others , the club surprisingly won the European Cup in the final against Benetton Treviso , which is the only title win of a French club team in the top European league to date. The team's hallmark was an exceptionally strong defense , for example Real Madrid with Arvydas Sabonis in the semifinals and Treviso with Toni Kukoč in the final at the Final Four tournament of the now called Euroleague competition, in which the French runner-up Limoges could also participate held no more than 55 points. In addition, they won the French national championship in a final victory against defending champion EB Pau-Orthez . In the summer of 1993, Zdovc then completed trial training at the NBA club New York Knicks . After this club could not decide on a further commitment, Zdovc moved to the Greek league A1 Ethniki to Iraklis Thessaloniki .

With Iraklis Saloniki Zdovc reached the Greek Cup final in 1994 and the semifinals of the European Cup Winners' Cup in 1995 . In the 1995/96 season, Zdovc was injured for a long time and after the club's financial difficulties, he left the club in December 1996 and moved back to France to Basket Racing in Paris , where he played again with the now 37-year-old Dacoury and won the French championship in 1997 . Coach Maljković also moved to Basket Racing the following season, but Zdovc accepted an offer from the Turkish club Tofaş SK from Bursa , for which he only played two games at the beginning of the 1997/98 season before he was seriously injured again and the rest of the Playing time as an assistant coach at his home club from Slovenske Konjice.

After he wanted to retire from his active career, he was persuaded to make a comeback by his former coach at Olimpija Zmago Sagadin . From 1998 he played two seasons for KK Union Olimpija, with whom he was able to celebrate the Slovenian double in 1999 and the title defense in the Slovenian cup competition in 2000. In 1999 he took part in his fourth European Championship finals with the Slovenian national team. Although they had regularly been able to qualify for the finals of the continental title fights since the separation from Yugoslavia, they never reached the quarter-finals in these events. After another season in Greece in the 2000/01 season at Panionios in Athens , Zdovc won again the double in Slovenia with KK Union Olimpija in 2002 and the championship of the first-time Adriatic League . The following season 2002/03 he began with local rivals KD Slovan , which he left after financial difficulties in December 2002 and continued the season with the traditional Croatian club KK Croatia Osiguranje from Split . With this club he won the Croatian championship at the end of his playing career in 2003.

Coaching career

After the end of his playing career, Zdovc was first assistant coach in November 2003 at the largest national rival of KK Union Olimpija, the KK Krka from Novo mesto . In December 2003, KK Split, where he had ended his playing career, signed him as a full-time coach. With the Croatians he was able to win the national cup in 2004. For the following season he was signed by KD Slovan, but in December 2004 they separated again. A year later he was again coach of a club for which he was also active as a player, and in December 2005 took over the fortunes of Iraklis in Greece. Zdovc did not manage to stabilize the team, which was relegated to the penultimate from the first class at the end of the season, and was released again in April 2006. In the following season he worked as a sports director at KK Union Olimpija.

In the 2007/08 season, Zdovc was coach of the traditional club KK Bosna from Sarajevo and won the championship title in Bosnia-Herzegovina with this team in 2008. In the second most important European club competition ULEB Cup 2007/08 , he had to experience as a coach how his team lost 127: 141 in an unforgettable game after five extra times against the German representative Alba Berlin . Nevertheless, the Bosnians were able to prevail in the preliminary round, but were eliminated in the next round against the Spanish representative CB Gran Canaria . In December 2008 he became the coach of KK Union Olimpija and in 2009 won the double in Slovenia straight away. At the 2009 European Championships he was the coach of the Slovenian selection. After the national team had always convincingly qualified for the quarter-finals in the two previous title fights, but then failed, Zdovc was even able to lead the selection team this time to the semi-finals, where the team was subject to the Serbs , who had been defeated in the preliminary round . The Serbs suffered a similar fate in the final, where they lost to the Spaniards , who they again defeated in the preliminary round, while Slovenia narrowly lost the bronze medal game by one point to Greece . After the tournament, Zdovc passed the national team's coaching position to Memi Bečirovič . In the two following seasons at KK Union Olimpija you could defend the national cup, but lost each time in the championship final series against KK Krka. In the ULEB Euroleague 2010/11 they reached the intermediate round of the sixteen best teams after they had been eliminated in the preliminary round without a chance in the previous two seasons. Zdovc himself resigned from his position as coach after the defeat in front of a home crowd in the Adria League final against KK Partizan Belgrade in April 2011.

For the 2011/12 season, Zdovc finally took over the coaching position at BK Spartak from Saint Petersburg in Russia . In the Eurocup 2011/12 , as the ULEB Cup was now called, he and his team reached the Final Four tournament, where they lost in the semifinals against the host and national competitor BK Chimki , who later also won the title, and ended up fourth . For these achievements, Zdovc was named “Trainer of the Year” in this competition. In the national championship you missed as fifth in the main round because of the poorer direct comparison with Lokomotive Kuban Krasnodar the entry into the championship play-off of the best four teams. In the Eastern European VTB United League 2011/12 they failed in the quarter-final play-offs against the same opponent in the final four tournament of this competition. The following season, Zdovc was dismissed from his post as coach in early April 2013 after elimination in the quarter-finals of the Eurocup 2012/13 against BK Budiwelnik Kiev and a rather average performance in VTB United League and PBL. In the 2013/14 season, Zdovc took over in the Türkiye Basketbol Ligi as coach of Royal Halı from Gaziantep .

Web links

Commons : Jurij Zdovc  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Zdovc, Jure - Trainer profile on the website of the ULEB Euroleague (English)
• Players - Jurij Zdovc (YUG). archive.fiba.com - Overview of participation in FIBA tournaments as a player
• Jure Zdovc - The Golden Slovenian - Appreciation of Vladimir Stanković on the ULEB Euroleague website (April 12, 2012)
• 50 Years interview: Jure Zdovc, Limoges ( Memento from December 31, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) - Interview with Zdovc on the Triumph of Limoges in 1993 (English, December 28, 2007)

Individual evidence

1. ^ NN: The All-Time Player Nominees. ( Memento of January 2, 2015 on the Internet Archive ) Archived from EuroLeague website; Barcelona, ​​January 2, 2015. Accessed February 2, 2019.
2. ↑ Alexander Wolff: United, They Stood. Sports Illustrated , July 8, 1991, archived from the original on November 8, 2010 ; accessed on September 24, 2011 (English). 
3. ↑ Legabasket: Jurij Zdovc. Lega Basket Serie A , accessed September 24, 2011 (Italian, player profile). 
4. ^ Final Four, Boxscore 1993. (No longer available online.) ULEB , formerly in the original ; accessed on May 8, 2012 (English, tournament statistics).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
5. ↑ Jurij Zdovc - Turkish Basketball League Player / Season 1997-98. TBLStat.net, accessed on September 24, 2011 (English, player profile). 
6. ^ Slovenian Basketball / Hall of Fame. Eurobasket.com, accessed September 24, 2011 (English, player profile). 
7. ↑ Player portrait: JURIJ ZDOVC. (No longer available online.) Basketball.powerweb.de, November 9, 1999, archived from the original on November 4, 2003 ; Retrieved September 24, 2011 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
8. ↑ Sensational victory after five extensions in the ULEB Cup. (No longer available online.) Alba Berlin , December 4, 2007, formerly in the original ; accessed on September 24, 2011 (match report).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.    
9. ↑ HOW DID THEY GET HERE? Union Olimpija. ULEB Euroleague , December 30, 2010, accessed September 24, 2011 . 
10. ↑ Zdovc leaves Olimpija. (No longer available online.) Talkbasket.net April 11, 2011, archived from the original April 30, 2011 ; accessed on September 24, 2011 (English). Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
11. ↑ All-Eurocup First Team players receive trophies. ULEB , April 15, 2012, accessed May 8, 2012 .