If this game happened in the USA, someone would have already made a movie about it.
Unfortunately, it happened in Croatia, an unhappy place for both movies and basketball. This game is largely forgotten, but still, it deserves a rewind because it was some real Hollywood stuff.
I was a young college freshman back then, working on my first ever journalist job. My duty was to cover a final four tournament of the Croatian Basketball Cup.
First semifinals. On one side stood Cedevita, the richest club in Croatia with a team of 12 highly trained and highly paid professionals. On the other side stood humble Zadar, once great, now struggling club. They got some sort of fine, so most of their players were suspended for the game, leaving them with a team composed of young players, most of them under 20 years of age.
Cedevita was a pretty young club back then, fueled by money of the Atlantic Group, one of the largest Croatian private companies. Since corruption and wasting of taxpayers money is modus operandi in Croatian sports, the inception of Cedevita basketball club was welcomed by pretty much everyone.
However, things never went as planned for Cedevita. Everything about them seemed so artificial, especially those professional, payed fans with trumpets and saxophones. It might work in the NCAA, but in Croatia it was just awkward. Thus, Cedevita was deemed a plastic club with no real fans.
Zadar, on the other hand, had 99 problems, but the fans weren’t the one. They had crazy and passionate support Cedevita would die for. On the semifinals in Zagreb, they showed up in numbers and loudly supported their team. Cedevita’s trumpets had no chance.
It seemed that Zadar’s team also had no chance, but youngsters kept on fighting. Probably the craziest fact is that Zadar never used a single substitution during the game – their starting five was their only five since bench players were like 15 years old. But those young guys, fueled by the noise from the stands, just refused to go down, and little by little, the game got to a close finish.
With under 24 seconds to go, Cedevita had one point lead, but Zadar had the last possession. Ivan Batur, one of the most experienced players with just 20 years of age, took the final shot, a buzzer-beating floater that went in for a big celebration.
Zadar played Zagreb in the finals, a club then fueled by politics and taxpayers money. Zadar got their first-team players back for that game, so young heroes from the semifinals spent most of the time on the bench. Result: easy win for Zagreb.
Some 10 years later, Zadar won the Croatian Cup in 2020, their first trophy after 12 years. Thousands of fans filled the streets, they just love basketball there.
Cedevita is not in Croatia anymore – they moved to Ljubljana in neighboring Slovenia. In their first season there they again failed to win a Cup, having lost in the finals to the crumbling, nearly bankrupted club Koper Primorska after they bought their coach and one of the best players. History repeated itself…
Everyday Struggle 