An Unnecessarily Exhaustive Guide To The EuroCup Final Four
April 15th, 2011
The NBA playoffs are basically upon us, and if you don’t pick a Bulls/Spurs finals, you’re a brave man. However, the onset of these playoffs is far from the only thing happening in basketball right now. After all, this is the crescendo of many league’s seasons, not just the NBA’s. This is particularly true in the cases of the intercontinental European leagues; the EuroLeague, which has already been covered, and the EuroCup, which is about to be. Continuing a series of posts that take fleeting glances at every worthwhile current player in the world today – the loose theme of which is ‘Why spend all that time watching it all just to never write about any of it?’ – there follows a look at the compelling protagonists of the final four teams in this EuroCup season. Teams list in no order other than alphabetical. Benetton Treviso After a thoroughly disappointing season last year, including being knocked out of the EuroLeague in only the qualifying round and being unable to make it out of the EuroCup top 16, Treviso jettisoned most of their roster. The biggest addition came in the form of Devin Smith, who joined from Greek side Panellinios. Smith is both the team’s leading scorer and its best defender, averaging 16.1 points in 28 minutes per game in EuroCup play, alongside 5.0 rebounds, 2.1 steals and 0.6 blocks. Smith started out life at a post player, has slowly worked his way outwards, and is now a pretty reliable ball handler and three point shooter as well. He probably takes too many threes now, and he’s certainly not explosive, but his offensive and defensive versatility make him the best player on the Benetton team. Alongside him in the frontcourt is well documented veteran Brian Skinner, who was signed a replacement […]
Europe for Americans
June 15th, 2010
More than one person has asked me in the past for a definition of how basketball works in Europe. Those persons are always American. They see words like “domestic competition,” “EuroLeague” and “Cup,” and they panic. All of those are concepts alien to the NBA, an incestuous league that only plays with itself, and they are not understood by the majority of American NBA fans. (Or, if not the majority, at least some.) So I’ll try to explain. All countries in Europe have their own domestic leagues. There’s the strong ones (Turkey, Spain, and a much weakened Italy), the top-heavy ones (Greece, Russia, etc), the ones slightly below that (Germany, France, etc), all the way down to the insignificant and/or terrible leagues (such as those in Moldova, Azerbaijan and Britain). Those leagues are by and large just like the NBA; over the course of several months, everybody plays everybody, with regular seasons and playoff structures. And at the end of it all, the best team wins. All these leagues are different in their own way; the French league is notorious for bad defence, and the Greek league is more physical than many of the others. (It’s also infamous for the salary payments being hideously inconsistent, something not helped by the current general Greek economic turmoil. For example, Maroussi – Greece’s third best team – have recently agreed to a two year repayment structure for their players who did not get paid last year, and may have to merge with a team from Crete just to stay solvent. It happens all across Europe at various times, but it happens a lot more in Greece.) However, they play fundamentally the same format. I have never seen a basketball league that does not have playoffs. For the most part, European teams are not […]
Robertas Javtokas has still got it
February 11th, 2009
For some reason, whenever we get a EuroCup game screened over here (something that happens way more than the screening of NBA games), it almost always involves Dynamo Moscow. It’s a bit annoying having to see the same old players out there time after time when there’s so many others that I’d rather watch. But it isn’t necessarily a bad thing, either, because Dynamo Moscow (as is the case with all EuroCup teams) has plenty of good quality talent on it, and I get to see them all over again. The most notable players on the Dynamo Moscow team are former Hawk swingman Travis Hansen, Spurs draft pick Robertas Javtokas, former Nets and Rockets forward Bostjan Nachbar, former Blazer and King forward Sergei Monia, big Lithuanian Darjus Lavrinovic, and Russian national team point guard Sergei Bykov. (Brian Chase, who recently signed with Dynamo, hasn’t played yet.) Travis Hansen has taken an acceptable NBA career and turned it into a beast of a European career, playing as a first option player on some of Europe’s better teams, showing a fine mid-range game, the ability to run the offence, and his ever-present athleticism. Nachbar is playing well against the far less athletic European opposition, and Monia still rocks the “I’ll do anything but shoot” approach that so befits a baby-faced tweener Russian. Lavrinovic is a good all-around player, with legit NBA size, an inside/outside game, good rebounding instincts and no ability to jump off the floor, and Bykov is a good little guard whose sensible and smooth play is making the loss of Jannero Pargo entirely survivable. However, the one I’m going to focus on is Javtokas. Often, the commentators talk of Robertas Javtokas’s 40-inch vertical. You may have heard about it yourself; it was his combination of great size and athleticism […]
Let Me Drago Pasalic You Up And Down
February 4th, 2009
In keeping with my new policy of talking about every game that I watch that isn’t an NBA game, here’s what I observed from last night’s EuroCup game between Iurbentia Bilbao and the home Lithuanian team with a Yorkshire inflection, Lietuvos Rytas. Go. – Bilbao’s line-up features only three Spanish nationals; point guard Javier Salgado, backup guard Paco Vazquez, and a really slow inside player with a massive head and greasy mullet called Salvador Guardia. The rest of the team was made up of foreign players, and it was pretty stacked; former, future and potentially future NBA talent on show included former Bucks forward and avid partygoer Damir Markota, former Jazz and Timberwolves swingman Quincy Lewis, former Heat tryer-outer Luke Recker, former Chicago Bulls summer league participant Drago Pasalic, Mavericks second-rounder Renaldas Seibutis, former Nuggets guard Predrag Savovic, the man the legend known as Frederic Weis (who did not play), Latvian international guard Janis Blums, and Croatian international big man Marko Banic. – Lietuvos, meanwhile, had only two players that weren’t Lithuanian – former South Carolina point forward Chuck Eidson, and Serbian big man Milko Bjelica, whose name sounds more like a lovely pudding. The rest of the team was made out of old clunky Lithuanians. (Eidson was awesome, by the way, and easily the best player in the game, despite all the talent and internationals on the court. But we’ll come to this later.) – For Bucks fans who fancy a cheap laugh at the expense of Damir Markota, I’ve got good news – he was pretty awful. Markota came off the bench in the first half, and did nothing at all, but for some reason he started the second half in place of Pasalic. He then proceeded to get involved on every possession, and normally in a bad […]
