Back in June, between Games 2 and 3 of the NBA Finals, former All-Star DeMarcus Cousins made national news when he was ejected from a game in the Puerto Rico league after an altercation with fans. The scuffle, captured in cellphone videos that quickly went viral, landed Cousins a suspension for the remainder of the Baloncesto Superior Nacional season.
But another longtime NBA player was standing just a few feet away as the chaos unfolded: 16-year veteran and onetime No. 6 pick Danilo Gallinari.
And, while sitting at his kitchen table in South Florida last week, Gallinari — with a sheepish grin — admitted something that few watching those videos would notice:
He started it.
“I hit him in his eye twice. We were scrambling to get the [rebound], and he fell down and the referee didn’t call it,” Gallinari told ESPN of that matchup of his Vaqueros de Bayamon against Cousins’ Mets de Guaynabo on June 9.
“And, from there, he started to go crazy at the ref. Our fans are crazy. They started to go at him and he started to have this conversation with one of our fans and I don’t know if he slapped or punched one of our fans — and they started throwing all kinds of stuff at him.
“So it was a huge thing, but everything started because I poked him twice in the eye.”
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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 final season as a professional on a basketball court, as, after joining the Italian national team during this summer’s EuroBasket tournament, the 37-year-old Gallinari officially announced on Tuesday that he is retiring from the sport.
All of that 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 JOURNEY BEGAN with a Sunday morning pickup run.
After Gallinari finished what turned out to be his final NBA season with the Milwaukee Bucks in 2024 — a six-game first-round loss to the Indiana Pacers — the free agent had visions of a 17th year in the 2024-25 campaign.
“I wanted to play my last one even if I knew it was going to be a veteran role, where you don’t play as much and you’re just mentoring guys,” he said.
But that plan required a team to call. Gallinari had relocated to South Florida full time with his wife, sports journalist Eleonora Boi, and at the time their two young children. So while he waited for interest from NBA teams, he stayed in basketball shape by playing in Sunday runs at the University of Miami with former NBA guard Carlos Arroyo and current and former collegiate players.
Arroyo, a Puerto Rico basketball legend who was the flag-bearer in the 2004 Athens Olympics and led his country to a stunning upset of the United States in that tournament, broached the idea of Gallinari continuing his career outside of the NBA.
“We maintained a conversation that went on for two to three months,” Arroyo told ESPN, adding that the two Miami neighbors would regularly meet for coffee in addition to playing pickup games.
“And it wasn’t until the fourth time that we sat down, I was just listening to him telling me [what] stage he’s in his career and what he expected from basketball and what he was willing to commit.”
At the time, Gallinari still had designs on playing a final time for the Italian national team in EuroBasket this fall but knew his only way of doing so was to be playing professionally somewhere in the months before the tournament began.
Gallinari’s final stint in professional basketball afforded him one last chance to play for his home country of Italy. Matteo Marchi/FIBA via Getty Images
Playing in Europe wasn’t a realistic option, as he didn’t want to uproot his young family. Arroyo, though, had recently become a part-owner of Vaqueros de Bayamon, the biggest club in Puerto Rico, which has won a league-leading 17 titles and plays in the 12,000-seat Ruben Rodriguez Coliseum just outside of San Juan.
“At the beginning, I wanted to play in the NBA,” Gallinari said. “I still wanted to finish like that. But then it’s February and I’m not playing.”
Gallinari took the 2½-hour flight from Miami and joined a league that, while perhaps not at the forefront of the minds of American basketball fans, is one steeped in tradition, including legendary coach Phil Jackson spending several seasons there in the mid-1980s.
“He was looking for something more stable, but close to home, somewhere he can 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. Just this past season, Gallinari was teammates with longtime NBA center JaVale McGee and former lottery 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 scattered across BSN rosters.
“Puerto Rico was amazing,” Gallinari said. “It was perfect. It gave me the chance, first of all, to play at a very high level, which I didn’t know was that high, playing 35 minutes a game.
“It had been a while since I played all those minutes, and I was the most important player of the team or one of the most important players of the team. … Those are the feelings that a player wants to have every time, and those are the feelings that I wanted to have and finish with.”
And, from Arroyo’s perspective, the feeling was mutual. “The fans loved him. He just galvanized everything that we had,” Arroyo said.
“We had a set date for him to get here to training camp, and he wanted to get here 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 tells you a lot about him. He never underestimated the league or the players.”
Gallinari’s stint in Puerto Rico also accomplished two feats that had escaped him in the rest of his decades-long professional career: He hoisted the championship trophy after leading Bayamon to the BSN championship, and he was named the Finals MVP.
“We were extremely, extremely honored to have had him at the end of his career and the way he ended up playing for us,” Arroyo said. “And there were days that I wanted to give him a game or two off because at his age, at the pace of the play in Puerto Rico and playing so many games a week, and he never wanted to take a day off ever.”
In his only season in Puerto Rico, Gallinari and Vaqueros de Bayamon won the Baloncesto Superior Nacional title. He was named the Finals MVP. Edgardo Medina/NurPhoto via Getty Images
And the run to the title there allowed him one final go-round with the Italian national team, which fell in September to Luka Doncic and Slovenia in the round of 16 in what became the final competitive game of Gallinari’s career. Still, he said even without the endgame of that EuroBasket appearance, he would’ve made the journey to Puerto Rico.
“I needed basketball,” Gallinari said. “From August [2024] to February, those months when I wasn’t playing, I needed it. And so it was pure joy. … Until you experience it, you don’t really know. And I couldn’t have asked for a better experience.”
TWENTY MILES FROM the setting 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 off days during his time in Puerto Rico — he joked that the team’s coach, Christian Dalmau, “didn’t like days off” — he, his then-six-months-pregnant wife and their two young children went to Isla Verde Beach in nearby Carolina, to which they had been given a resort membership by Arroyo and the team’s other owners.
“I was born close to the beach,” Boi, who grew up on the island of Sardinia, told ESPN. “I love the water. … They wanted to stay inside the pool, but I said, ‘It’s packed. 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 she was rushed to a local hospital to make sure that she and the couple’s unborn child would be all right.
“We grew up watching ‘Baywatch.’ It’s something that you really see in the movies, and [it is] so far away from you that you think that you were never going to experience it.” Gallinari said. “Even the stats say that you are not going to experience it. … It was very shocking. It’s still shocking now.”
And while both Gallinari and Boi said they are still working through the trauma of the incident, in the end there were no complications with the pregnancy, with their baby being born a few weeks ago and everyone doing well.
Gallinari and his wife, sports journalist Eleonora Boi, in 2019. The couple met close to a decade ago, and Boi said she only gave him a chance after her sister urged her to do so. “She said, ‘Please, give him a chance for me!” Boi told ESPN. TM/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images
Gallinari’s now-expanded family is a major reason he chose to walk away from the sport that has dominated his life since before he was even born.
“Can I [play another season]? Yes. But now I’m 37. I have a big family, beautiful family, three kids, and I want to be able to play with them at a high intensity.
“I’m very competitive. My dad was very competitive with me. … When I beat him the first time, it was a huge deal for us in the family. So I want to be able to live the same things that my dad was able to live with me as a kid with my kids.”
His father, Vittorio, was roommates with Mike D’Antoni while the two were teammates for Olimpia Milano. At the time, D’Antoni was arguably the biggest star in Italy, where he also began to make his name as a coach 30 years ago before coming to the NBA.
And it was in the NBA where D’Antoni, after his remarkable run with Steve Nash and the Phoenix Suns in the mid-2000s, was reunited with the Gallinaris when he became the 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 dad was my first roommate when I got to Italy, and for six years, that whole team was inseparable,” D’Antoni said. “We had so many good times that we spent together.
“Just by coaching him, it was a flood of those memories, and his family, and getting to know him as a kid.”
SIXTEEN YEARS IN the NBA took their toll on Gallinari’s body. He didn’t make an All-Star team in his career — 14 official seasons plus two lost to ACL tears a decade apart — and reached the conference finals only once, with the Atlanta Hawks in 2021.
But despite the multiple knee injuries, and missing the vast majority of his rookie year with a separate back issue, he said he’s immensely proud of becoming one of fewer than 300 players to play at least 14 seasons in the NBA, and to have accomplished what he did in the sport.
“Of course there is a fine line between … I think it was an amazing career [but] without injuries, we are talking legendary,” Gallinari said.
Gallinari was drafted by the Knicks in 2008. In 2011, he was part of the blockbuster trade that sent Carmelo Anthony from Denver to New York. Nathaniel S. Butler/NBAE via Getty Images
Some of the people who spent time with him across his many NBA stops — from the Knicks to the Nuggets to the LA Clippers, Oklahoma City Thunder and Hawks before his career finished with stints with the Washington Wizards, Detroit Pistons and Bucks — agreed.
“He could have been big-time,” said Doc Rivers, who coached Gallinari with the Clippers and Bucks. “I don’t think he 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 I was so impressed with, that he had lost a lot of his speed and he still was smart enough to play basketball.”
“A lot different,” D’Antoni said, when asked what Gallinari’s career would’ve looked like without the injuries. “He immediately had that back injury his rookie year, and those are hard to come back from.
“It’s not easy to have the career he’s had with the constant injuries that plagued him.”
None of those injuries, though, hurt quite as much as the torn ACL 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 pace to be a top seed when Gallinari injured his knee in April, causing him to miss the rest of that season and the entirety of 2013-14.
Gallinari spent more than six years with the Nuggets, helping lead Denver to 57 wins in 2012-13. Doug Pensinger/Getty Images
“I feel like we could have done something if he doesn’t get hurt,” longtime NBA forward Corey Brewer, now an assistant coach with the New Orleans Pelicans, said of that Nuggets team. “That’s one of the best teams I ever played on.”
Though Gallinari went on to have very productive stints with the Clippers, Thunder and Hawks for the next several years before the second ACL tear wiped out 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 is counting on me for that year, and many years ahead,” Gallinari said. “We are one of the best teams in the league. We are third in the West, we are projected to go far in the playoffs and with the chance to win a championship.
“That’s the feeling a player wants at least once in their life: that you are the best.”
Gallinari has accepted how his career played out and has no issues moving into the next phase of his life, between different business opportunities he’s involved with 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 searching for in the NBA.
“When you are a basketball player, you want to feel that,” Gallinari said. “But then you start to be a backup, and then you play less and less and less and you get away from those feelings.
“Puerto Rico gave me my feelings back.”
