Petteri Koponen joins the coaching staff of the NBA club San Antonio Spurs’ summer league team.
Former player legend of the Finnish national basketball team Petteri Koponen will be transferred to the coaching staff of the NBA team San Antonio Spurs’ summer league team. The 36-year-old Koponen will travel to San Antonio immediately after the draft event held this week.
The traditional Las Vegas summer league will be played from the 12th to the 22nd. July. Before that, the Spurs camp in Sacramento.
During the last two years, Koponen has worked as a junior coach in the invitational tournament of young promises and in the coaching management of HBA-Märsky.
– In April, I received a call from San Antonio asking if I would be interested in helping them with the summer league coaching. Koponen says in the Basketball Association’s press release.
– Closer to the summer, there were similar calls from other NBA teams, but Spurs seemed like a good choice. San Antonio is traditionally one of the NBA’s most European basketball teams, which felt good to such a long-time Eurobasketball fan.
In the summer of 2007, Koponen, who was selected 30th in the first round at the NBA draft, represented the Portland Trailblazers in the Las Vegas summer league in 2007 and 2008. He did not play any NBA games in his playing career.
Koponen ended his professional career for the 2022 European Championship, while representing Helsinki Seagulls at the club level. Koponen represented, among others, Virtus Bologna, Himki BK, FC Barcelona and Bayern Munich in Europe’s top leagues. In the national basketball team, Koponen played 132 matches and scored 1759 points.
A year ago, in the NBA summer league, Finns were seen in pairs, when Mikael Jantunen represented the Golden State Warriors as a player and Lassi Tuovi served as a guest coach for the Utah Jazz summer league team.