Valencian player Víctor Claver announced this Monday, about to turn 36, his retirement from the courts after a professional career of almost twenty years that began and ended at Valencia Basket, and in which he has played in elite European teams and in the Portland Trail Blazers of the NBA, but also with a brilliant record in the best period of the Spanish national team.
After starting his training at the Maristas school in Valencia and completing it at Valencia Basket, he rose to the club’s first team taronja in the summer of 2006 and began a professional career that has led him to play 400 ACB matches alone, with nine seasons in two stages at the Fonteta club. With Valencia Basket he won the Euro Cup in 2010 and despite his youth he took on a leading role that allowed him to accelerate his progress and attract the attention of the best European clubs, but also of several NBA franchises.
Chosen in 22nd place in the first round of the 2009 draft by the Portland Trail Blazers, in 2012 he made the jump to the American league and became the twelfth Spanish player and the first Valencian to play in this competition. As a rotation player he accumulated 82 games in the NBA with an average of thirteen minutes, three points and two rebounds per game. After an administrative stint with the Denver Nuggets, he left the United States in 2015 to begin a second European stage that included stints with Khimki and Lokomotiv Kuban, with whom he played a key role in the Euroleague final in 2016.
His brilliant role in the Russian team led him to join Barcelona, a club where he spent five seasons and with which he won the Copa del Rey twice before returning to Valencia Basket in the summer of 2021. In these almost two decades, Claver has been close to joining Baskonia, with whom he signed an agreement in 2015 that Valencia matched in the score, and with Real Madrid, with whom he also closed an agreement a year later that did not happen. It was confirmed when the Madrid entity did not reach an agreement with Valencia as Barça did, which paid close to two million for his rights.
In a publication on his social networks, Claver has shown himself “grateful” for everything he has experienced in his 18 years of career and for all the people who have supported him. “I have fulfilled dreams that I never imagined when I was a child. Along the way I have learned that the important thing is not what awaits you when you reach the end, it is everything that you experience throughout it and, above all, who you share it with,” he noted in the message on social networks in the one who announced his decision. After finishing his second stage in the entity orangeAt the end of this campaign, Claver explored his options and finally decided to retire. “It may not be the retirement you dreamed of,” he admitted in the text. This continues the path that Sergio Rodríguez has recently taken and will follow after the summer Rudy Fernández, two of his usual teammates along with his great friend Ricky Rubio.
Fixed in the lower categories of the Spanish team, he debuted with the senior team in the 2009 Eurobasket in Poland, from where he returned with the gold medal, the first of the three he won with Spain in this continental tournament (Lithuania 2011 and Germany and France 2015), in which he also won a bronze (Slovenia 2013). Claver also has in his brilliant record the silver at the London Olympic Games in 2012, the bronze at Rio de Janeiro 2016, as well as the gold at the World Cup. of 2019 in Pekin, an event to which Spain arrived with many injuries in the interior game and in which the Valencian, with a usual secondary role in a team full of stars, had a great leading performance, with an average of 8, 5 points and 5 rebounds and an outstanding impact on the game.
“I have tried to be the best player I could be by helping my team win,” Claver summarized. “It’s time to be honest with myself and listen to my body. “I close this stage of my life with the peace of mind of having given everything and having done it by being me,” he said before reiterating his gratitude “to all” those who have been part of his journey.
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