{"id":188094,"date":"2025-10-03T19:23:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-03T19:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/188094\/"},"modified":"2025-10-03T19:23:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-03T19:23:09","slug":"goga-bitadze-faces-tough-eurobasket-winning-crowd-at-the-orlando-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/188094\/","title":{"rendered":"Goga Bitadze faces tough EuroBasket-winning crowd at the Orlando Magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Johnny Askounis\/ info@eurohoops.net<\/a><\/p>\n

Goga Bitadze spent the bottom end of the offseason with the senior national team of Georgia, helping his country rank eighth in the EuroBasket 2025 tournament.<\/p>\n

\u201cGreat thing for the country of Georgia. Nobody has ever done that in our history,\u201d he mentioned during the preseason media day of the Orlando Magic<\/a> on Monday.<\/p>\n

However, Magic teammates Franz Wagner and Tristan da Silva returned from FIBA action as gold-medalists with Germany.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaking the top eight teams maybe doesn\u2019t sound great after Franz and Tristan won it all, but for the little country of Georgia, it\u2019s a huge thing,\u201d explained the 26-year-old Georgian big.<\/p>\n

Following up on international spells in the FIBA World Cup 2023 and EuroBasket 2022, Bitadze averaged 15.8 points per contest in the most recent edition of EuroBasket.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe guys who were there with the national team for so many years, they\u2019ve done so many things, and sacrificed so much for the national team. They deserved it,\u201d he praised other players on the team coached by Aleksandar Dzikic.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe population of Georgia is 3.5 million. For us, being able to beat Spain, being able to beat France, it wasn\u2019t like a fluke that we just beat some easier teams and we made it out of the group. We took it the hard way,\u201d he also recapped the path from pool play at Limassol to the knockout stage in Riga.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was also great for me personally. You can get that little extra confidence that you can play with the best,\u201d added Bitadze.<\/p>\n

In contrast to the native of\u00a0Sagarejo, a town 58 kilometers outside of Tbilisi, and his Magic teammates on the German national team, Moritz Wagner sat out EuroBasket due to injury. Continuing knee surgery rehab, he remains sidelined to start the 2025 NBA Preseason.<\/p>\n

Read the latest News<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Johnny Askounis\/ info@eurohoops.net Goga Bitadze spent the bottom end of the offseason with the senior national team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":188095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-188094","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-basketball","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=188094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/188094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/188095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=188094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=188094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=188094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}