Đorđe Gagić – alternatively anglicised to Djordje Gagic – is a veteran of European basketball. The 34-year-old 6’11 Serbian centre has a ton of experience all across the continent, including various stints with his country’s national team, and has a couple of stints in the top-level intracontinental competition, the EuroLeague, included in his decade and a half at the second and third tiers.
Gagic has honed his craft in that time, and learned some tricks along the way. In the final stages of his career, he knows what to do. However, it logically follows from there that he should also surely know what not to do. Which makes the technical foul he picked up this week all the more baffling.
Playing in his third career stint for Lithuanian team Lietkabelis in the quarter-finals of Lithuania’s domestic league, the LKL, Gagic was taken by a moment of madness. At the start of the fourth quarter, Gagic was at the free throw line to shoot two foul shots, when he called over the referee to ask if he could go to the bench to wipe sweat from his hands.
When the referee said no, Gagic – for some reason – proceeded to wipe them on the referee’s leg.
A Moment Of Madness To A Stroke Of Luck
Article 36.2.1 of the rules of the basketball world’s governing body, FIBA, state that among other things, technical fouls can be awarded for “[d]isrespectfully dealing and/or communicating with the referees”. It seems hard to dispute that wiping sweaty hands on them counts as that.
The referee on whom Gagic wiped his hands was not the one who called the technical foul. Presumably, he did not notice. Instead, after a brief pause (presumably to process the absurdity of what he had just seen), his colleague in front of the Lietkabelis bench called the tech, and sent the starting shooting guard from the opposing Juventus team, Karolis Lukosiunas, to the other free throw line.
Each individual point matters more in European basketball leagues than in comparison to the NBA. This is because of the much lower scoring rate, borne out of the shorter 40-minute matches and a generally slower pace of play, given the NBA’s almost-monopolisation of the sport’s most athletic players.
Having won the first match of the quarter-final series by a score of 83-77, Gagic’s Lietkabelis team were halfway towards winning the best-of-five series. They were however trailing 68-67 at the time of the incident, and needed cooler heads to prevail to move on to the semi-finals and a series against Lithuania’s perpetual second-best team, BC Rytas.
In the case of Gagic, cooler hands might also have helped.
Gagic, Surely, Had Other Options
Fortunately for Gagic and Lietkabelis, Lukosiunas – a 75% free throw shooter on the season – missed the freebie. Gagic therefore largely got away with a situation he should never have created; the technical foul also added one to both his personal and the team’s total foul counts for that quarter, but neither in the end proved costly.
After Lukosiunas’s miss, Gagic got the ball back at the line, and – with his hands presumably now a bit drier – made both. Those two foul shots represented the first two of the 13 points he would score in the fourth quarter on his way for 21 in the game, stepping up in the clutch for his team as they secured a 93-90 closeout victory and the semi-final berth.
Averaging 9.7 points and 5.0 rebounds per game in LKL play this season on shooting percentages of 55.1% from the field and 73.5% from the free throw line, Gagic – for the most part – provided the sure-handed veteran presence that proved decisive when his team needed it. For a moment there, though, he was a moist-handed trouble-starter.
Perhaps in the future, a teammate will volunteer their shorts as a towel instead.
EuroLeague Player Receives Technical Foul for Sweating on Ref