Any comparison of sporting greats from different eras is destined to be inconclusive, and that is especially true of the two Turkish Airlines EuroLeague All-Decade Teams chosen so far this century. Differences in formats, numbers of games and average playing time do not allow for easy quantitative comparisons. The fun part, however, is comparing them qualitatively, because even though no one can be right when doing so, it brings up the non-stop great memories that all of them left on the court.
From the first decade this century, the 10 best players were Dejan Bodiroga, Dimitris Diamantidis, J. R. Holden, Sarunas Jasikevicius, Trajan Langdon, Juan Carlos Navarro, Theo Papaloukas, Anthony Parker, Ramunas Siskauskas and Nikola Vujcic.
From the second decade were Diamantidis and Navarro again, plus Bogdan Bogdanovic, Nando De Colo, Luka Doncic, Kyle Hines, Sergio Llull, Georgios Printezis, Vassilis Spanoulis and Milos Teodosic.
Much better than comparing them is to simply thank them for all they did to lift European basketball to new heights!
The Scorers
Only one player on either all-decade team has won the Alphonso Ford Top Scorer Trophy for the highest average points in a season. Nonetheless, the greatest EuroLeague scorers ever fill both teams. The all-time top four in total points – Spanoulis, Navarro, Printezis and De Colo, in order – are among 11 all-decade honorees ranked in the top 20. The 2000-10 team has five such players and the 2010-20 team has eight, both counts including Navarro and Diamantidis. While the sole Ford Trophy winner was De Colo in 2015-16, the all-decade player with the highest single-season scoring average was Dejan Bodiroga, with 20.1 per game for Panathinaikos 2001-02. Anthony Parker (16.3 ppg.) Bodiroga (16.1) and De Colo (16.0) are ranked among the top 10 in scoring average all-time and second, third and fifth, respectively, for players with more than 75 games played this century.