Lea Hakala remembers the first time she played against basketball great Uljana Semjonova. It was 1981, shortly after the European Championships, and the Soviet Union had once again won its way to a European Championship gold medal — its eighth since Semjonova joined the national team in 1968.

After the initial intimidation felt by Semjonova’s 213 cm, Hakala, then a player on the Finnish National Team, recalled Semjonova’s basketball skills.

Compiling a list of the "most influential Americans" ever to play in Europe is no small task, as opinions vary from country to country, as each nation thinks  that its first truly important American was the most influential ever to play on the  Continent.

It's like arguing about who really started the jump shot: the truth is that the jump shot started...everywhere...at the same time, like Americans in Europe.

Sergei Belov’s average day is far from average.

“It’s basketball,” he said with a slight laugh.

Since the birth of the European Championships in 1935 and the first European club competition in 1958, literally thousands of players have stepped up to play at the top level. Yet few have had the impact on the record books as that of former Greek superstar, Nick Galis.

Playing in the 1980‘s and early 1990‘s Galis literally broke scoring records in almost every competition he entered, playing for Aris Thessaloniki and Panathinaikos Athens. He also masterminded the greatest ever achievement of any Greek national team, namely a gold medal at the 1987 European Championship.  

Pier Luigi Marzorati played his first tournament with the Italian national team in 1973 in Spain. Wrapped up in the excitement of the experience, the rookie was thrilled to have a Spanish journalist call his hotel room for an interview.

Little did he know that just down the hall in another room sat all of his teammates huddled around team leader Dino Meneghin, who had slyly slipped into his best Spanish accent. “I am a sportswriter from Spain,” he informed Marzorati.”

There is perhaps no bigger name in the history of European basketball than Drazen Petrovic. This “Basketball Mozart” was a boy genius who put the Croatian city of Sibenik on the map. He would go on to dominate basketball in his country, win honours with Spanish giants Real Madrid and make the leap to the NBA.

It was just when he was establishing himself as the first European to be an NBA star and that Croatia was basketball’s strongest country behind the US dream team, that his life tragically ended in a car crash outside Munich, Germany.