His mom put it another way: “It’s like our second religion.”
His coach summed it up: “They have a good reputation of knowing how the game should be played.”
Dominic Pangonis, his mom Dalia and Wright State head coach Clint Sargent all were talking about Lithuania and the way its people not only embrace basketball but excel at it.
Their story is the Baltic version of Hoosiers.
Lithuania is a small nation – just 2.9 million people — but when it comes to basketball, it does big things.
It rose to prominence on the world stage some 34 years ago, not just because of the way its players lit up the scoreboards, but how they captured the hearts and imaginations of everyone from the NBA to the Olympics.
Pangonis was born and raised in Ontario, Canada and since 2024 has played college basketball in the United States, last year at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas and this season at Wright State, where he’s a 6-foot-7 starting guard averaging 9.2 points per game.
And yet, when it comes to basketball, Canada and the U.S. aside, Pangonis identifies as Lithuanian.
His parents, Tomas and Dalia, came from Alytus, Lithuania to Canada 22 years ago, but they kept their heritage alive in their two children — Dominic and his younger sister Camille — teaching them to speak the language, learn their history and especially develop a love of their homeland.
“I’m very prideful of my Lithuanian roots,” Dominic said a few days ago as he sat just off the court at the Nutter Center following practice.
Until her son became heavily involved with AAU basketball and traveled a lot, Dalia said the family would visit Lithuania every summer. All their relatives still live there and sometimes they would stay almost three months.
“Lithuania is beautiful,” Pangonis said. “I love going there.”
He not only speaks Lithuanian, but can write it too, his mother said by phone from Canada.
Growing up, he went to Lithuanian classes on Saturdays and to a Lithuanian church on Sundays.
His first basketball experience was with a Lithuanian youth team and his mother said they used to travel to the U.S. to play in Lithuanian tournaments that drew teams not only from their Toronto area, but Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and other cities with sizable Lithuanian populations.
Pangonis was especially inspired by some of the Lithuanian hoops legends — guys like Arvydas Sabonis and later his son Domantas; Sarunas Marciulionis; Zydrunas Ilgauskas; Rimas Kurtinaitis and so many more — who starred in the NBA and the Olympics and often both.
‘This bronze medal represents our soul’
Lithuanian basketball took the world by storm at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
The nation’s team rivaled the debut of the American Dream Team, a who’s who of famed NBA players, so much so that the Lithuanians were called “The Other Dream Team.”
Annexed by the Soviet Union, which occupied the nation during World War II, Lithuania became the first Soviet republic to break away when it proclaimed the restoration of its independence in March of 1990. That was a year before the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union.
Basketball had been popular in the country since the 1920s, but until its independence the many great players who were raised there had their national identity cut from under them by the Soviet sickle.
They didn’t just play for the Soviets, they carried the gold-medal winning team, especially when it knocked off the American squad, made up of college players like David Robinson and Dan Majerle, 82-76, in a semifinal game. Up to then Team USA had an 88-1 record in Olympic competition.
The Soviet team had four Lithuanian starters. I covered those Olympics for the Miami News where I worked at the time. I remember trying to interview some of the Lithuanians and how the Soviet agents hovered close and monitored everything that was said and sometimes shut down or flatly denied interviews altogether.
The coming out party for the Lithuanians was in Barcelona, where for the first time on a worldwide stage, the Baltic basketball players could not only show their hoops prowess, but use that status to banner the freedom of their people.
Marciulionis had led the 1988 Soviet team and as the 1992 Games approached he already was playing for the Golden State Warriors in the NBA.
The Lithuanian team had plenty of talent but no money to fund its travels to pre-Games qualifying tournaments, much less the competition in Barcelona itself.
Marciulionis and his friend, Donnie Nelson, a Golden State assistant coach, set out to make the Lithuanians plight known in the Bay Area and contacted a San Francisco sportswriter who wrote a story on the situation.
That account caught the interest of the Rex Foundation, the non-profit entity created by the Grateful Dead in 1983. One of the Rex board of directors was Bill Walton, the hoops legend who was also a Deadhead hall of famer who would see over 1,000 of the famed band’s shows before his death in 2024.
The Rex Foundation not only decided to help finance the Lithuanian Olympic effort, but more funds were raised by Grateful Dead merchandising when it started selling psychedelic Grateful Dead inspired t-shirts that were tie-dyed in the colors of the Lithuanian flag and on the front depicted a skeleton slam dunking a basketball.
As the Lithuanian team started to roll to victories — and even when they were beaten by the American Dream Team featuring Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Charles Barkley, Karl Malone and several more stars — they became the Cinderella’s of the Games.
Their greatest moment came when they won the bronze medal by beating the Russians, who were teamed with athletes from 12 of the former Soviet satellite states and billed as The Unified Team.
The Lithuanians decided to wear their tie-dyed shirts onto the medal podium. Several of the players were in tears and I remember Sabonis saying: “The medal in Seoul was gold, but this bronze medal represents our soul.”
Those tie-dyed shirts became the hottest souvenir of the Games and today remade versions still are sold. The initial sales were so robust that much of the money collected went to children’s charities in Lithuania.
At the next Games in Atlanta in 1996 and again at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia — where the Lithuanians lost to Team USA by just two points — the nation won bronze medals.
That, and the influx of Lithuanian players into the NBA, forever sealed the country’s reputation as one of the world’s greatest hoops havens.
And it’s why Dominic Pangonis is so proud of his basketball roots.
While he knows the story of the Barcelona Games, which transpired before he was born, he said he does not have one of those prized tie-dyed shirts:
“One of my buddies has one, but he said they go for a crazy amount of dollars now. Maybe one day I’ll be able to get one.”
Basketball ‘is in our blood’
Dominic’s mom, Dalia, remembers the pride people felt as her countrymen became Barcelona headliners in 1992. Although still a teenager, she was a definite basketball fan.
When we talked she recalled how four Lithuanians had starred for the Soviets in 1988 and she remembers the euphoria that swept her homeland, especially when “The Other Dream Team” stood on the medal podium in in their flag-colored t-shirts and waved bouquets of flowers as their medals were draped over their necks and tears streamed down their faces.
Her husband Tomas was a handball player of note, so when Dominic was born after they moved to Canada, it was no surprise he eventually gravitated to sports.
“He started playing basketball when he was like 4 ½,” Dalia said. “He was tall and he was good and basketball became his sport.”
That tall and good combination eventually got him to the New Horizon Academy in Burlington, Ontario where he was rated the third best recruit in the province.
He initially committed to the University of Wyoming Cowboys, and they made a big deal of his signing and referred to him as “The Canadian Cowboy.”
But then in May of 2024, the Cowboys head coach Jeff Linder left the school to become an assistant at Texas Tech.
Pangonis decommitted, but it was late to find another school. Finally, he landed at Stephen F. Austin and as a freshman was averaging over 21 minutes and 6.2 points a game.
But in the middle of the season the school fired head coach Kyle Kellar after his team started 1-7 in Southland Conference play.
Pangonis still prospered under interim coach Tony Jasick, who had been an assistant. But at season’s end the school decided to hire someone else and Dominic felt abandoned again.
He reluctantly entered the transfer portal and that’s when Wright State, looking for a guard with size who could shoot, reached out. In turn, Pangonis was looking for stability and support that wouldn’t suddenly bail out on him.
Wright State brought him to campus for a visit and assistant coach Jaaron Simmons gave him a strenuous workout.
“Right then you could tell he had good humility, a very low sense of entitlement and he was tough,” Sargent said. “We liked what we saw.”
Pangonis has been in 20 games for the Raiders, started 14 and has played the second most minutes on the team (26.6 a game) entering tonight’s game at Green Bay.
In the last four games he’s taken his production up a notch and is averaging 13 points a contest and is shooting 50 percent from three-point range.
During this time the 13-8 Raiders have won eight of their last nine games and sit atop the Horizon League standings at 8-2.
“Dom has been one of our most consistent, everyday guys,” Sargent said. “He’s really been a good addition for us.”
But then, what would you expect?
Like he said, basketball “is in our blood.”
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