Antonis Fotsis

Antonis Fotsis — Biography

Antonis Fotsis (Andonis Foçis in Turkish) is a 2.09 m Greek basketball player, one of the faces of Panathinaikos's EuroLeague successes in the 2000s. He usually played power forward and sometimes center; he was known as "Batman", a nickname his junior national-team teammates gave him for the way he glided above the rim. Besides being the first Greek-born player to play in the NBA, he captained the Greek national team.

He began his professional career at Ilysiakos in 1996 and moved to Panathinaikos a year later. He became a key player in 1999-2000 and won the EuroLeague title at just 19. In 2001-02 he played 28 games for the Memphis Grizzlies before returning to Europe. With Real Madrid he won the Spanish league in 2005, and with Dinamo Moscow the EuroCup in 2006; in 2007 he took 24 rebounds against Benetton Treviso, a EuroLeague single-game record for the post-2000 era. He returned to Panathinaikos in 2008 and was in the Triple Crown team that won league, cup and EuroLeague in 2009, and he won the EuroLeague again in 2011. After two seasons at Olimpia Milano he came back to Panathinaikos in 2013, and in 2017 he moved to Ilysiakos. He won ten Greek league titles in all.

With the national team he took bronze at the 1998 U18 European Championship, gold at EuroBasket 2005 and silver at the 2006 World Championship; he took over as captain from 2009 and the team won bronze that year; Greece finished fifth at both the 2004 and 2008 Olympics. In 2016 he also took Turkish citizenship. In 2022 he was inducted into the Greek Basket League Hall of Fame.