When the basketball giant Giannis Antetokounmpo walked to the dressing room of the Greek national basketball team, 115 kilograms athletically spread over 2.11 meters, sleeveless and in shorts, headphones on his ears, a man in a suit suddenly shot down the hall, screamed, jumped him into his muscular arms and kissed his cheeks with tears.

The NBA pro gave him a friendly hug, laughed and gently put him back on the floor.

Michael Reinsch

Correspondent for sports in Berlin.

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He and his team had the round of 16 against the Czech Republic ahead of them on Sunday in Berlin. In addition to 33 minutes of impressive presence, he was supposed to contribute 27 points, 10 rebounds and 5 assists to his team's 94:88.

That means: This Tuesday evening (8.30 p.m. on Magentasport and RTL) the German team will play in the round of the top eight against 27-year-old Antetokounmpo, the “Greek Freak” of the American NBA league.

“They will always play their game”

Last year he was champion there with the Milwaukee Bucks, twice in previous years he was named Most Valuable Player of the Season (MVP) and once as MVP of the Finals.

He is also the subject of a Disney film about the rise of the child of a Nigerian refugee family in Greece to a world star who receives forty million dollars a year from his club alone.

Antetokounmpo was the outstanding player of the game, although the Czech players, as their point guard Tomas Satoransky put it, tried to "build a wall around Giannis".

The Wall fell, Berlin is Berlin, and the Greeks avoided the foreseeable defeat with great effort.

The word Herculean task was never more appropriate than for the challenge of measuring oneself against the Greek hero.

"Whether it's Luka Doncic, whether LeBron, whether Giannis: they will always play their game," says German playmaker Dennis Schröder.

The others have to be played out.

"Stopping Giannis is almost impossible."

"Wins for me"

However, the hero of the evening was the flying coach: Gianmarco Pozzecco.

His Italian selection threw championship favorites Serbia, coached by Svetislav Pesic, out of the competition 94-86.

NBA star Nikola Jokic's 32 points were nothing compared to Nicolo Melli's 21 points, Simone Fontecchio's 19 and Marco Spissu's 22 - a total of 16 three-pointers from 38 distance throws.

In the final minutes, Pozzecco was no longer in Antetokounmpo's arms but on his knees behind the bench screaming, wrestling with players and staff who tried to force him back into the dressing room.

The referees, who had irritated him beyond measure with strange decisions and above all with admonitions from his players on the bench, had expelled him from the hall in the third quarter after two technical fouls.

He left in tears.

Now his team feared losing the win if he returned illegally.

The players finally threw themselves on him, cheering.

"He said win for me.

And we did it," Spissu commented.

Pozzecco, a former point guard with occasional dyed hair on the ball, was temporarily banned from the national team and had his greatest successes when he reached the 2004 Euroleague final with Bologna and led the Azzurri to the final of the Athens Olympics.

In 2019 he won the Europe Cup as a coach with Sassari.

"These were not twelve players today, these were twelve lions," Pozzi, as he is called in Italy, sounded: "They shook the world."

Croatia's Miro Bilan, who was eliminated with his team against Finland and watched the game, recalled two and a half seasons with Sassari in Italy.

"During this time, Pozzecco was thrown out of the hall eight times," he said: "Edo took over eight times." Edoardo Casalone, Pozzecco's assistant, also stepped in on Sunday.

However, the only undefeated team in the European Championship is Greece.

It will take a strong team to change that.