Travel tales from Slovenia
The Stein Line was fortunate enough to have insider access to the retirement party weekend for Goran Dragić in Slovenia. We take you behind the scenes here
LJUBLJANA, Slovenia — My first-ever trip to the homeland of Luka Dončić and the many Slovenians that I covered before him (Nesterović, Nachbar, Vujačić, Udrih, etc.) centered around the sort of game that doesn't really exist back home.
I grew up reading about testimonial matches for retiring soccer players in England in the 1980s: Exhibition games staged by clubs to honor a particularly well-regarded retiree. On Saturday night at the Stožice Arena here, Slovenia's first-ever NBA All-Star and longtime All-Lefty Team favorite Goran Dragić was fêted with the modern version of a testimonial.
Translation: Dragić was the host of his own Night of the Dragon retirement party ... which was intended to generate money for charity rather than the suddenly former player getting the funds.
In a zero-percent surprise, I had an absolute blast. I was decades overdue for a trip to this part of the world, as explained earlier this week, and this maiden weekend in Slovenia only fueled my belief that I need to find a way someday to visit all of these basketball havens in the Balkans and learn about them first-hand.
Yet there was one major issue I encountered during this excursion. So many NBA people made the l-o-n-g trip here, in a true testament to Dragic's popularity as a player and teammate among fellow players and former coaches, that I was hesitant to leave the hotel. Within my first half-hour upon arrival Thursday night, I crossed paths with Dragić, Chris Bosh, longtime Miami Heat executive Andy Elisburg, power agent Bill Duffy and a couple former Dallas Mavericks that I used to cover named Nowitzki and Nash.
I didn't dare stray too far from the hotel lobby after that sort of tipoff.
Didn't dare miss the opportunity to, say, run into lovable characters like Robin Lopez and Boban Marjanović … even if that meant I'd actually see very little of the city.
There will be more stories to come from what I gathered in my notebook, but I decided to lead off on The Day After The Game with the written version of a highlight reel of some of the fun stuff I saw: