TRIVIA 12/1/09

Aside from the US which country has produced the most NBA players? (by country of birth)

beat

beat

Serbia

swish

swish

partial credit!

combined with Montenegro made the
former Yugoslovia and
have supplied 16 players to the NBA

follow up, 2 contries are tied for second with 15 each, who are they?

That was the Comcast question the other night.

Do you know what country is 3rd?

I do if you consider being tied for second, means one of those is third.

beat

Wikipedia has it a little different.

They have Canada with 19 – Serbia with 20 – Montenegro with 5.

So whether you combine Serbia with Montenegro or not, Canada is still third.

Montenegro - 5

* Žarko Čabarkapa (also a Serbian citizen, represented Montenegro internationally)
* Predrag Drobnjak
* Predrag Savović
* Slavko Vraneš
* Aleksandar Radojević

Serbia - 20

* Miloš Babić
* Radisav Čurčić
* Predrag "Sasha" Danilović
* Vlade Divac
* Žarko Paspalj
* Aleksandar "Sasha" Djordjević
* Mile Ilić
* Marko Jarić (also a Greek citizen, represented Serbia internationally)
* Nenad Krstić
* Darko Miličić
* Aleksandar Pavlović (born in Montenegro)
* Kosta Perović
* Vladimir Radmanović
* Žarko Čabarkapa (also a Montenergin citizen, represented Montenegro internationally)
* Igor Rakočević
* Željko Rebrača
* Predrag "Peja" Stojaković (also a Greek citizen, represented Serbia internationally)
* Dragan Tarlać (also a Greek citizen, represented Serbia internationally)
* Ratko Varda
* Rastko Cvetković

Canada – 19

* Joel Anthony
* Norm Baker
* Hank Biasatti (born in Italy, but a Canadian citizen)
* Ron Crevier
* Bobby Croft
* Samuel Dalembert (born in Haiti, naturalized in Canada, represents Canada internationally)
* Rick Fox (dual citizen of The Bahamas and Canada; represented Canada internationally)
* Stewart Granger
* Lars Hansen (born in Denmark, naturalized in Canada, represented Canada internationally)
* Bob Houbregs
* Todd MacCulloch
* Jamaal Magloire
* Steve Nash (born in South Africa, naturalized in Canada, represents Canada internationally)
* Leo Rautins
* Mike Smrek
* Gino Sovran
* Ernie Vandeweghe
* Bill Wennington
* Jim Zoet

Mrkleen

Original question was Country of birth not citizenship!

Canada and France have 15 each
Yugoslavia has 16

these are by birth

beat

Gotcha.

here they are

NBA/ABA Players Born in Serbia and Montenegro (Yugoslavia)

Babic, Milos 1990-1991
Curcic, Radisav 1992-1992
Cvetkovic, Rastko 1995-1995
Divac, Vlade 1989-
Djordjevic, Aleksi 1996-1996
Drobnjak, Predrag 2001-
Ilic, Mile 2006-2006
Jaric, Marko 2002-2007
Paspalj, Zarko 1989-1989
Rakocevic, Igor 2002-2002
Rebraca, Zeljko 2001-2005
Savovic, Predrag 2002-2002
Slokar, Uros 2006-2006
Tarlac, Dragan 2000-2000
Turkcan, Mirsad 1999-1999
Varda, Ratko 2001-2001

NBA/ABA Players Born in Canada

Anthony, Joel 2007-2007
Baker, Norm 1946-1946
Crevier, Ron 1985-1985
Croft, Bobby 1970-1970
Fox, Rick 1991-2003
Granger, Stewart 1983-1986
Houbregs, Bob 1953-1957
Macculloch, Todd 1999-2002
Magloire, Jamaal 2000-2007
Rautins, Leo 1983-1984
Smrek, Mike 1985-1991
Sovran, Gino 1946-1946
Vandeweghe, Ernie 1949-1955
Wennington, Bill 1985-1999
Zoet, Jim 1982-1982

NBA/ABA Players Born in France

Abdul-wahad, Tariq 1997-2002
Ajinca, Alexis 2008-
Batum, Nicolas 2008-
Diaw, Boris 2003-2007
Diawara, Yakhouba 2006-2007
Gelabale, Mickael 2006-2007
Mahinmi, Ian 2007-2007
McQueen, Cozell 1986-1986
Moiso, Jerome 2000-
Petro, Johan 2005-2007
Pietrus, Mickael 2003-2007
Rigaudeau, Antoine 2002-2002
Stewart, Michael 1997-
Turiaf, Ronny 2005-2007
Wilkins, Dominique 1982-1998

Never knew Dominique was born if France?

beat

Anyone know anything about Bob Houbregs (one of the Canadians)? He was
arguably the greatest-ever practitioner of the long hook shot. He'd
take sweeping hooks, from anywhere, that even Heinsohn would have
envied. He'd often take them from roughly what now is the three-point
arc—and he made a high percentage.

He and Brandon Roy are the only two University of Washington Huskies to
have their numbers retired. And he's a member of the Basketball Hall
of Fame even though playing only five seasons in the league and
averaging less than double digits in scoring. (The reason? His
stellar collegiate record, culminating in being dubbed the NCAA Player
of the Year in 1953.)

He was VERY briefly with the Celtics (#20) in 1954-55 but is not listed by Basketball Reference as getting into a game.

He was one of the reasons why the hook shot became my favorite shot ever.

I believe he's still alive at age 77.

Sam

Sam

found this but it's a couple of years old

Wednesday, December 17, 2003

Where Are They Now: Bob Houbregs
50 years later, UW basketball great remains close to the program

By DAN RALEY
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

On game night at Edmundson Pavilion, he watches from an aisle seat almost directly below the blanket-sized purple banner hanging from the rafters that carries his name and number.

Fifty years after leading the Washington basketball team to its only Final Four appearance, Bob Houbregs hasn't strayed far from the program.

At 71 and moving gingerly, he remains the Huskies' most highly decorated player. He is their only consensus All-America selection and NCAA player of the year recipient. He holds 10 school records, including most points scored in a game, 49. In fact, he is responsible for the three highest scoring totals, also providing 45 and 42.

And no one else has had a UW basketball jersey retired, a gesture initiated on Houbregs' behalf when his career ended in 1953 and enhanced earlier this season with the unfurling of a banner displaying No. 25.

"Of all the honors, that touches me the most," he said. "It was voted on by my teammates, taken to athletic director Harvey Cassill and presented to me at the team banquet, and I'm not sure I adequately thanked them for that. It was such a shock to me. It really means a lot to me. I really loved my teammates."

Today, the former Huskies center lives in Olympia with his wife of nearly 50 years, Ardis. They set up residence in the state capital to be near the family of one of their four grown sons, specifically two adopted grandchildren from India.

Some day the 6-foot-7 Houbregs will have to tell them how he used to toss in his soft hook shot with such regularity it propelled the Huskies into two NCAA Tournaments and earned him the nickname "Hooks."

He was the Canadian-born son of a well-traveled, minor league hockey player who settled in the city after playing for the Seattle Eskimos. Houbregs gave the ice game a try but didn't like it. He found a sport more to his liking as a Queen Anne High School freshman.

Grizzlies basketball coach Ray Normile spotted him in the hallway one day and asked him to turn out. Skinny and 6 feet, 4 inches tall, Houbregs was a project. Yet by his final prep season, he averaged 17.5 ppg and was given a UW scholarship.

Two years later, Houbregs was the starting center for a 24-6 Huskies team that made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament, losing to Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State).

As a junior, Houbregs averaged 18.6 ppg and was a second-team All-America choice, but this 25-6 UW team failed to get into the tourney, which was doubly disappointing because the Final Four was held at Edmundson Pavilion that year.

"I sold programs outside, that's all did," he said of the finals. "I didn't want to go in. My heart was still broken."

Houbregs got over that disappointment. As a senior, he averaged 25.6 ppg for a 28-3 club and was named college player of the year by the Helms Foundation. In the NCAA Tournament, he scored 45 in a first-round victory over Seattle University in the first meeting between the two neighborhood schools; fouled out early in the second half of a blowout loss to Kansas in the semifinals; and closed out his career by outscoring fellow All-American Bob Pettit 42-36 as the Huskies beat LSU in the now-defunct third-place game.

"I thought we were the best team there, I really did -- I still do," Houbregs said of the '53 Final Four in Kansas City. "It was a shame we weren't able to prove it."

Of the UW starting five that season, an all-senior lineup, guards Joe Cipriano and Charlie Koon and forward Doug McClary are deceased, leaving only forward Mike McCutcheon and Houbregs as surviving members.

Houbregs played just five NBA seasons. He ended up in five cities, getting drafted in the first round, traded once and had a franchise disappear.

He wasn't quite the same scorer as a pro, averaging a pro-best 11 ppg each for two Fort Wayne teams that advanced to the NBA finals, with a high game of 30, twice. His career came to a sudden end after he ran into a basket support, severely injuring his back.

"I got up and continued to play, but the next game I bent over and tried to get the ball off the floor and couldn't straighten up," he said.

"The doctors advised me that I should retire."

Keeping his hand in basketball, Houbregs sold shoes for Converse before and after a near five-year stint as general manager of the Sonics.

Now he sits and watches the latest UW players try to rebuild the program, providing a link to a glorious past. He has a banner to prove it.

P-I reporter Dan Raley can be reached at 206-448-8008 or danraley@seattlepi.com

Good article, Beat. Houbregs was really quite a college phenom.

Another one who would merit some research is Bevo Francis, who scored 116 and 113 in two college games in Houbregs' era (playing for tiny Rio Grande College, which had a student body including something like only 40 males). A
spectacular shooter from inside and out.

He flunked out of college and never played in the NBA, despite being drafted by Philadelphia, because he found he could make more money playing for the patsies of the Globetrotters. I believe he's around age 76 now.

Sam

sam

I really never heard about these guys

They must have been fun to watch

here is a piece I found on Bevo

At one time, everyone knew Bevo
By Mike Puma
Special to ESPN.com



"He was one of those drum-beat stories. You sit by the tree, you hear people talking about the great legends of the game, then you hear people talk about Bevo, yeah," says former Georgetown coach John Thompson about Bevo Francis on ESPN Classic's SportsCentury series.




Francis (32) still holds the NCAA record for most points in one game with 113.
Long before the term "Cinderella" was attached to little-known college basketball teams making names for themselves in the NCAA Tournament, there was Bevo Francis, the embodiment of a Cinderella story.


In the early 1950s, Francis became a national sensation playing for tiny Rio (pronounced RYE-oh) Grande College in southeastern Ohio. Almost a half-century later, many of his scoring records still stand.


The 6-foot-9, sweet-shooting Francis still holds the college record for most points scored in a game (113) and his 46.5 average in the 1953-54 season remains the NCAA Division II mark.


His 48.3 average in 1952-53 is the NAIA record. Actually, Francis averaged 50.1 that season, but a 116-point performance and 26 other games didn't count in the official NCAA and NAIA stats because they came against junior colleges, military bases and bible seminaries.


"He was one of the greatest shooters who ever lived," NBA scouting director Marty Blake says. "It was a gift. He could not only shoot but shoot with range."


Francis points out that he played in an era before the three-point line. "With today's rules, I probably could have scored 135 in a game," he says. "Probably could have averaged 65."


Never having played in the NBA, Francis disappeared from the basketball scene almost as quickly as he emerged as a shooting star. But the legend of Bevo Francis is alive and well.


Born Clarence on Sept. 4, 1932 in Hammondsville, Ohio, he was the only child of Clarence and Anna Francis, who had six children from earlier marriages. His father worked in the clay mines while his mother watched over their small farm.


His father was called Bevo, after a near-beer bottled by Anheuser-Busch. "My dad drank it all the time," Francis says. "They called him Bevo, me Little Beve. I finally outgrew that."


Due to anemia, Little Beve missed two full school years. But he grew tall at an early age and became active in sports. He became a local legend as a teenager, thanks to his unerring jump shot, developed by sometimes spending eight hours a day practicing.


Francis had a turbulent high school career. He was ruled ineligible to play basketball as a freshman after complaints surrounding his transfer from Irondale to Wellsville High School. There were rumors that his parents had been given a house to entice them to move.


The next season, Francis practiced with the Wellsville varsity team, but was declared ineligible minutes before his first game after the school superintendent called the Ohio High School Athletic Association to check on Francis' status. The board president said if the superintendent was calling to check, Francis must have been guilty of something.


Bevo finally joined the basketball team for his junior season and was given No. 32 by his coach, Newt Oliver, because that's how many points Francis was expected to average.


He came close, averaging 30.6 to lead Wellsville to a 23-2 record. But before he got a chance for an encore, he turned 20, at which point his high school eligibility expired.


As a sophomore, Francis had married sweetheart, Jean Chrislip. The first of their two children, Frank, was born following their junior year.


When Oliver moved to Rio Grande, he brought his star player with him. He also made sure Francis enrolled at the local high school to finish the missing 1½ credits he needed to earn his degree.


There were 94 students, just 38 men, at Rio Grande when Francis arrived in 1952. The gymnasium had a tile floor, leaky roof and seated fewer than 200 fans.


Oliver assembled a 39-game schedule against low-level competition that was designed to showcase Francis' offensive talents. The coach also spent $25 of the athletic department's money to ensure Francis' scoring figures would be included in the NCAA's weekly statistics.


"I knew that people wouldn't pay to see five players score 15 points each," Oliver said. "But I knew they would flock in to see one player score 50."


On Jan. 9, 1953, Francis had the game of his life, scoring 116 points in Rio Grande's 150-85 victory over Ashland (Ky.) Junior College. A few nights later, Francis scored 51 in a 101-53 victory over Bliss College to give him 1,072 for the season, breaking the record of 1,051 set the previous year by Johhny O'Brien of the University of Seattle.


But Francis wasn't finished. On January 24, before a capacity crowd of 2,400 in Zanesville, Ohio, he scored 68 points in a 133-82 victory over Mountain State Junior College of West Virginia. The team's winning streak soon hit 25, and Francis was the talk of college basketball. Rio Grande began playing its entire schedule on the road to accommodate the large number of fans who wanted to see the hot-shooting star.


By February, Francis had already claimed a nice portion of the college basketball record book - most field goals, free throws, highest scoring average and points in a season.


Francis finished the season with 1,954 points and a 50.1 average as Rio Grande went 39-0. However, in March, the NCAA ruled that it would not recognize Francis' marks because schools that weren't four-year institutions comprised much of the Redmen's schedule. Among the excluded contests was his 116-point performance.


Though Rio Grande was an NAIA school, the next season Oliver scheduled 27 of 28 games against colleges that met NCAA standards, with all the contests being on the road. The first big date was Dec. 3, 1953, when Rio Grande hit Broadway, playing Adelphi in New York's Madison Square Garden before almost 14,000 fans. Rio Grande's winning streak ended at 40 as Francis was held to 32 points - only four in the second half - in an 83-76 loss.


"Their humiliating scores against nonentities is a travesty on the entire structure of intercollegiate athletics," wrote Jimmy Breslin.


But the next night, Francis scored 39 as Rio Grande lost 93-92 in overtime to Villanova in Philadelphia. Three nights later, he notched 41 as the Redmen defeated Providence 89-87 in Boston Garden.


Later in December, Francis scored 48 in a 98-88 victory over Miami. In a Christmas tournament in Raleigh, he had 34 in a 92-77 loss to North Carolina State and 32, including a game-winning jumper in the final seconds, to defeat Wake Forest 67-65.


On Feb. 2, 1954, in the Jackson (Ohio) High School gym, Francis hit triple digits again - and this time his record stood. Though frequently guarded by three players, Francis scored 113 against Hillsdale College of Michigan, sinking 38-of-70 shots from the field and 37-of-45 from the foul line in the 134-91 victory.


Francis scored 1,255 points in 27 games (46.5 average) against four-year colleges and was named a second-team All-American by the Associated Press.


Late in his sophomore year, Francis was suspended from Rio Grande for missing too many classes and midterms.


In April, he signed with the Harlem Globetrotters for $12,000 per year, and was assigned to the Boston Whirlwinds,
Bevo Francis (c) signs to play with the Boston Whirlwinds, a touring team that played the Globetrotters.
one of the white teams that barnstormed with the Globetrotters. "We'd play two quarters and then be the clowns," says Francis, who played two years with the Whirlwinds. "It was a dog's life."


In 1956, he was drafted in the third round by the NBA champion Philadelphia Warriors, but turned down their contract offer.


After barnstorming and playing in the Eastern League, in the early 1960s Francis began working in an Ohio steel mill, loading trucks for almost 20 years until the plant closed in 1982. He was six months away from getting his pension.


Now retired, Francis lives with Jean in the same seven-room, redbrick ranch house in Highlandtown, Ohio, that they bought in 1954 for $9,500.


"I wasn't a singer or movie star, but there was a time when everyone in the country knew my name," he says. "They did know Bevo."

Beat,



I believe Bevo made the cover of Life Magazine. He was really quite a
celebrity for a while. As the article pointed out, his fantastic
records were compiled against inferior competition, but he fared VERY
well against top-flight colleges too. I recall being disappointed that
he never tried the NBA because I was curious about what level he'd rise
or fall to there.


Frank Selvy's 100-point game also came against an unknown college.
Newberry College sounds like a cross between Andy Taylor's home and an
old Peter Lawford movie. I bet old Frank would have traded all 100
points for just two against the Celtics in 1962.

Sam