Numbers don’t describe Leandro Bolmaro’s impact on Olimpia’s team. “He has characteristics no one else has, so he’s crucial for us,” says Coach Peppe Poeta. The Argentine, who wears the number 10 in honor of his idol Diego Armando Maradona, who could have been a star in the long jump and high jump, and who is studying to be a dee-jay, has nevertheless put up impressive numbers this season. For example, in his last four games he scored 70 points. In 20.3 minutes of average playing time, he had scored 9.6 points per game, grabbed 3.1 rebounds, and dished out 2.1 assists. But numbers don’t tell the true story. What explains Bolmaro is his ability to defend four different types of players, from point guard to power forward, and his ability to be moved around the game at many positions, because he can play as a point guard and even as a power forward. For all this—his versatility, his impact, his destructive spirit on defense—Leandro Bolmaro was named Best Defender of the Italian league. He is the second Olimpia player to win the trophy after Kyle Hines.
Leandro Bolmaro completed some sort of a personal sweep because he was named Best Defensive Player of the Supercup in Milano and then he repeated at the end of Italian Cup Final Eight in Torino.
Bolmaro began playing for Almafuerte, in Las Varillas, a city in the province of Córdoba. In 2017, he moved to Bahia Blanca to play for Estudiantes. After a year, he moved to Barcelona, which in turn used him on the second team (averaging 10.4 points, 3.1 rebounds, and 2.7 assists). In 2019/20, he played for both the first team and the reserve team (averaging 14.9 points and 3.6 assists). In the 2020/21 season, he was a regular on the first team, making 30 appearances in the EuroLeague, including the Final Four in Cologne (26 minutes on the court in the semifinal against Olimpia and 25 in the championship game against Efes), and 33 in the league, averaging 6.4 points per game and shooting 45.3 percent from three. In 2020/21, he won both the Copa del Rey and the Spanish league. At the end of that season, he exercised his option to opt out of his contract and move to the NBA, where Minnesota acquired the rights to him after the 2020 draft (he was selected 23rd overall by New York). Bolmaro played for two years in the NBA, first in Minnesota and then in Utah, making 49 appearances. In 2023, he finished the season in Tenerife, Spain, and in 2024, he played for Bayern Munich (averaging 8.4 points and 3.4 assists in the EuroLeague with 30 appearances, 28 of which were starts), winning the German title (averaging 7.7 points and 2.8 assists, 38.5 percent from three) and the German Cup. Having arrived in Milan in the summer of 2024, he won the Super Cup twice and the Italian Cup once.
