Giant from Lodi province who played in America’s NBA
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| Danilo Gallinari joined New York Knicks in 2008 after entering the draft |
Danilo Gallinari, one of only 12 Italian-born athletes to have played in America’s National Basketball Association, was born on this day in 1988 in Sant’Angelo Lodigiani in Lombardy.
Gallinari, who stands 6ft 10ins tall, played for nine NBA teams over a 16-year period before announcing his retirement
He turned out for the New York Knicks, Denver Nuggets, Los Angeles Clippers, Oklahoma City Thunder, Atlanta Hawks, Boston Celtics, Washington Wizards, Detroit Pistons and Milwaukee Bucks.
He had a reputation for quiet leadership and his calmness in putting away three-pointers - field goals scored from outside the three-point arc surrounding the basket - earned him the nickname 'The Silent Sniper'.
Although he never won an NBA title, Gallinari earned more than $200 million in the course of his career.
Gallinari, whose father, Vittorio, played professional basketball for teams in Milan, Pavia, Bologna and Verona, began his career in 2004 with Casalpusterlengo, a third-level Italian team from a town about 25km (15 miles) from his home in Sant’Angelo Lodigiano.
He moved up a tier in 2005 by joining Armani Jeans Milano and then Edimes Pavia, where in 2006 he was named best Italian player in the Italian League Second Division, despite missing half the season through injury. Read more…
This earned him a move to his father’s old club, Olimpia Milano, in which he was named as the First Division’s best player under the age of 22 in his first season and topped the league’s overall efficiency ratings in 2007-08.
Gallinari also represented Olimpia Milano in the elite
EuroLeague – basketball’s equivalent of the Champions League in football –
scoring 27 points in his final game of the 2007-08 campaign against Maccabi Tel
Aviv.
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| Danilo Gallinari, representing the Italian national team in 2010 |
New York Knicks acquired him as the sixth draft pick and
gave him a two-year contract.
Gallinari’s time in the NBA has been bedevilled by injuries
yet his performances have improved year on year.
He missed a large part of his debut 2008-09 season with back
problems and, after sustaining an anterior ligament injury that ended his
2012-13 season at Denver early, he had to sit out the entire 2013-14 season as
he underwent rehabilitation.
Gallinari, who plays as a small forward/power forward, was
also sidelined for the final 22 games of the 2015-16 season with Denver because
of an ankle injury. Nonetheless, he rated his six years with the Nuggets as the most enjoyable period of his career and retains a great affection for the Colorado city.
He was the biggest acquisition of the summer for Los Angeles
Clippers when he joined them in 2017.
For all his injury problems, Gallinari’s statistics demonstrated how he was an enormously valuable player when fit. In 2009, he set a career-high points haul of
30 for New York against Philadelphia 76ers; his final career-high was 47 points, which he recorded in a double-overtime loss to Dallas Mavericks for Denver
Nuggets in 2015.
In the 2018-19 season with LA Clippers, he enjoyed the best scoring streak of his career, scoring 20 points or more in nine straight games, achieving a career-high season average of 19.8 points per game.
After leaving Milwaukee Bucks after the 2024 season, Gallinari spent the final season of his career in Puerto Rico for Vaqueros de Bayamón, helping them win their 17th national title before announcing his retirement.
Gallinari has been married since 2022 to former Mediaset sports journalist Eleonora Boi, born in Sardinia, whom he met in 2017. They live in Miami.
This article was updated in August, 2026.
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| A sunlit Piazza della Vittoria |
Travel tip:
Both Sant’Angelo Lodigiano and Casalpusterlengo are municipalities
in the province of Lodi, an historic small city on the banks of the River Adda
that was the property of the Visconti family and the Sforzas in the 15th
and 16th centuries, when it had great value as the central town of a
richly fertile agricultural area, which it is to this day. Its prosperity was the consequence of a
system of artificial rivers and channels, work on which began in the 13th
century, that was created to irrigate what had previously been arid and
unusable land. The heart of the city is the beautiful Piazza della Vittoria.
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| The Mediolanum Forum, home of Olimpio Milano |
Travel tip:
The Olimpio Milano team, sometimes known as Emporio Armani
Milano, play their home matches at the Mediolanum Forum, an indoor sports and
concert arena with seats for 12,700 spectators, situated in the Assago suburb
of Milan and now accessible by a direct Metro service from the centre of the
city. Assago is also home to the Italian
headquarters of Nestlé.