Danilo Gallinari: From the NBA court to glory in Puerto Rico and retirement
In June, between games 2 and 3 of the NBA Finals, former All-Star DeMarcus Cousins made national news after being ejected from a game in the Puerto Rican league following an altercation with fans. The incident, captured in videos that quickly went viral, earned Cousins a suspension for the remainder of the Baloncesto Superior Nacional season.
But another long-time NBA veteran was a few meters away as the chaos unfolded: Danilo Gallinari, a player with 16 years of experience and former No. 6 draft pick.
Sitting at his kitchen table in South Florida, Gallinari admitted, with a shy smile, something few would notice when watching those videos: “I started it.”
I hit him twice in the eye. We were fighting for the rebound, and he fell and the referee didn’t call the foul. And, from there, he started going crazy with the referee. Our fans are crazy. They started going after him and he started talking to one of our fans and I don’t know if he slapped or hit one of our fans, and they started throwing all sorts of things at him.
Danilo Gallinari
But all the attention on Cousins’ dramatic exit overshadowed the fact that Gallinari was playing in Puerto Rico in the first place. It was his last season as a professional on a basketball court, as, after joining the Italian national team during this summer’s EuroBasket tournament, Gallinari officially announced his retirement from the sport.
This all begs a simple question: Why was Gallinari, who has earned more than $200 million in the NBA and is a basketball icon in his native Italy, plying his trade a couple of hours southeast of his now permanent home in Miami?
It was, as Gallinari said, “Pure love for basketball”.
The Beginning of an Unexpected Journey
The journey began with an informal game session on a Sunday morning. After Gallinari finished what turned out to be his last NBA season with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2024, a first-round loss in six games against the Indiana Pacers, the free agent had the vision of a seventeenth year in the 2024-25 campaign.
“I wanted to play my last year, even if I knew it was going to be a veteran role, where you don’t play much and you’re just advising the guys,” he said.
But that plan required a team to call. Gallinari had moved to South Florida full-time with his wife, sports journalist Eleonora Boi, and at the time their two young children. So, while waiting for interest from NBA teams, he kept in shape by playing in Sunday sessions at the University of Miami with former NBA point guard Carlos Arroyo and current and former college players.
Arroyo, a Puerto Rican basketball legend who was the flag bearer at the 2004 Athens Olympics and led his country to a surprising victory over the United States in that tournament, suggested the idea that Gallinari continue his career outside the NBA.
“We had a conversation that lasted two to three months,” said Arroyo, adding that the two Miami neighbors met regularly for coffee in addition to playing informal games.
“And it wasn’t until the fourth time we sat down that I simply heard him tell me what stage of his career he’s in and what he expected from basketball and what he was willing to compromise.”
At that moment, Gallinari still intended to play one last time for the Italian national team in this autumn’s EuroBasket, but he knew that the only way to do it was by playing professionally somewhere in the months leading up to the start of the tournament.Gallinari’s final stage in professional basketball gave him one last chance to play for his home country, Italy.
Playing in Europe wasn’t a realistic option, as he didn’t want to uproot his young family. Arroyo, however, had recently become a co-owner of the Vaqueros de Bayamón, the largest club in Puerto Rico, which has won 17 titles, the most in the league, and plays in the Coliseo Rubén Rodríguez, with a capacity of 12,000 spectators, on the outskirts of San Juan.
“At first, I wanted to play in the NBA,” Gallinari said. “I still wanted to finish like this. But then it’s February and I’m not playing.”
Gallinari took the 2 and a half hour flight from Miami and joined a league that, although perhaps not in the minds of American basketball fans, is full of tradition, including the legendary coach Phil Jackson, who spent several seasons there in the mid-1980s.
“He was looking for something more stable, but close to home, somewhere he could finish playing and play at a high level and just play his game and just have fun,” Arroyo said. “And I think it met all his requirements.”
The BSN has become a popular stop for former NBA players. Last season, Gallinari was teammates with NBA center JaVale McGee and former draft pick Chris Duarte. Emmanuel Mudiay, the league’s regular season MVP, was Gallinari’s rookie when the two were teammates with the Denver Nuggets a decade ago. Bryn Forbes, Hassan Whiteside, Ian Clark, and Kenneth Faried were among the former NBA players spread across the BSN rosters.
“Puerto Rico was incredible,” Gallinari said. “It was perfect. It gave me the opportunity, first of all, to play at a very high level, which I didn’t know was so high, playing 35 minutes per game.
“I hadn’t played so many minutes in a while, and I was the most important player on the team or one of the most important players on the team… Those are the feelings a player always wants to have, and those are the feelings I wanted to have and finish with.”
And, from Arroyo’s perspective, the feeling was mutual. “The fans loved him. He simply galvanized everything we had,” Arroyo said.
“We had a fixed date for him to arrive at training camp, and he wanted to arrive at least a week earlier because he wanted to show his team, his new teammates, that he was committed to winning a championship. So that says a lot about him. He never underestimated the league or the players.”
Gallinari’s season in Puerto Rico also achieved two feats that had eluded him in the rest of his long professional career: he lifted the championship trophy after leading Bayamón to the BSN championship, and he was named Finals MVP.
“We feel extremely, extremely honored to have had him at the end of his career and for the way he ended up playing for us,” Arroyo said. “And there were days when I wanted to give him a game or two off because, at his age, at the pace of the game in Puerto Rico and playing so many games a week, and he never wanted to take a day off.”In his only season in Puerto Rico, Gallinari and the Vaqueros de Bayamón won the Baloncesto Superior Nacional title. He was named Finals MVP.
And the race for the title there allowed him one last opportunity with the Italian national team, which fell in September to Luka Dončić and Slovenia in the round of 16, in what became the last competitive game of Gallinari’s career. Even so, he said that even without the ultimate goal of that appearance in the EuroBasket, he would have made the trip to Puerto Rico.
“I needed basketball,” Gallinari said. “From August [2024] to February, those months when I wasn’t playing, I needed it. And then it was pure joy… Until you experience it, you really don’t know. And I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.”
An Unexpected Ending
Twenty miles from the scene of what would become his greatest professional achievement, Gallinari’s final basketball chapter nearly took a disastrous turn.
On July 31, on one of Gallinari’s few days off during his time in Puerto Rico, he joked that the team’s coach, Christian Dalmau, “didn’t like days off,” he, his wife, who was then six months pregnant, and their two young children went to Isla Verde beach, in nearby Carolina, to which Arroyo and the other team owners had given them a resort membership.
“I was born near the beach,” said Boi, who grew up on the island of Sardinia. “I love the water… They wanted to stay in the pool, but I said: ‘It’s full. Let’s go to the beach.’ Then, everything happened.”
While the family was wading in shallow water, Boi was bitten on the leg by a shark and was rushed to a local hospital to ensure that both she and the couple’s child were okay.
“We grew up watching ‘Baywatch.’ It’s something you really see in the movies, and [it’s] so far from you that you think you’re never going to experience it,” Gallinari said. “Even the statistics say you’re not going to experience it… It was very shocking. It’s still shocking now.”
And although both Gallinari and Boi said they are still dealing with the trauma of the incident, in the end there were no complications with the pregnancy, and their baby was born a few weeks ago and everyone is fine.Gallinari and his wife, sports journalist Eleonora Boi, in 2019. The couple met almost a decade ago, and Boi said she only gave him a chance after her sister urged her to do so. “Please, give him a chance for me!” Boi told ESPN.
The now-expanded Gallinari family is one of the main reasons he chose to step away from the sport that has dominated his life since before he was born.
“Can I [play another season]? Yes. But now I’m 37 years old. I have a big family, a beautiful family, three children, and I want to be able to play with them at a high intensity.
I am very competitive. My father was very competitive with me… When I beat him for the first time, it was a big deal for us in the family. So I want to be able to experience the same things that my father was able to experience with me when I was a child with my children.”
His father, Vittorio, was Mike D’Antoni’s roommate while the two were teammates on Olimpia Milano. At the time, D’Antoni was arguably Italy’s biggest star, where he also began to make a name for himself as a coach 30 years ago before coming to the NBA.
And it was in the NBA where D’Antoni, after his notable stint with Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns in the mid-2000s, reunited with Gallinari when he became coach of the New York Knicks in May 2008, a few weeks before the franchise selected Gallinari with the sixth overall pick in that June’s draft.
“His father was my first roommate when I arrived in Italy, and for six years, that whole team was inseparable,” D’Antoni said. “We had many good times we spent together.
Just by training him, it was an avalanche of those memories, and his family, and knowing him as a child.”
Gallinari’s Legacy in the NBA
Sixteen years in the NBA took its toll on Gallinari’s body. He never made an All-Star team in his career (14 official seasons plus two lost due to ACL tears a decade apart) and only reached the conference finals once, with the Atlanta Hawks in 2021.
But despite multiple knee injuries, and missing the vast majority of his rookie year with a separate back problem, he said he is immensely proud to become one of fewer than 300 players to play at least 14 seasons in the NBA, and to have achieved what he did in the sport.
“Of course, there’s a fine line between… I think it was an incredible career [but] without injuries, we’re talking about a legend,” said Gallinari.Gallinari was drafted by the Knicks in 2008. In 2011, he was part of the trade that sent Carmelo Anthony from Denver to New York.
Some of the people who spent time with him in his many stops in the NBA, from the Knicks to the Nuggets, the LA Clippers, the Oklahoma City Thunder, and the Hawks before his career ended with stints with the Washington Wizards, the Detroit Pistons, and the Bucks, agreed.
“He could have been first-class,” said Doc Rivers, who coached Gallinari with the Clippers and the Bucks. “I don’t think he’s ever had more than a year and a half stretch where he was healthy, and that derailed him. Especially late, when we had him with the Clippers…”
“That’s what impressed me so much, that I had lost a lot of speed and was still smart enough to play basketball.”
“Very different,” D’Antoni said, when asked how Gallinari’s career would have been without the injuries. “He immediately had that back injury in his rookie year, and it’s difficult to recover from that.”
It’s not easy to have the career he’s had with the constant injuries that plagued him.
However, none of those injuries hurt as much as the ACL tear he suffered with the Nuggets during the 2012-13 season. That Denver team, the year after he joined as part of the package that brought Carmelo Anthony to New York, won 57 games under coach George Karl and was on its way to being a top seed when Gallinari injured his knee in April, causing him to miss the rest of that season and all of 2013-14.Gallinari spent more than six years with the Nuggets, helping to lead Denver to 57 wins in 2012-13.
“I feel like we could have done something if he hadn’t gotten hurt,” said longtime NBA forward Corey Brewer, now an assistant coach for the New Orleans Pelicans, about that Nuggets team. “That’s one of the best teams I’ve ever played on.”
Although Gallinari continued to have very productive seasons with the Clippers, Thunder, and Hawks in the following years before the second ACL tear erased his best chance to win an NBA title with the 2022-23 Boston Celtics, those lost seasons in Denver remain a fleeting memory of what could have been.
“I was the best player on the team, the franchise counts on me for that year and for many years to come,” Gallinari said. “We are one of the best teams in the league. We are third in the West, it is expected that we will go far in the playoffs and with the possibility of winning a championship.
That’s the feeling a player wants to have at least once in their life: that you are the best.”
Gallinari has accepted how his career unfolded and has no problem moving on to the next phase of his life, between the different business opportunities he is involved in and spending time with his family. That peace is largely due to how things ended in Puerto Rico, where he finally experienced what he spent 16 years looking for in the NBA.
“When you’re a basketball player, you want to feel that,” Gallinari said. “But then you start being a substitute, and then you play less and less and you move away from those feelings.
“Puerto Rico returned my feelings.”
