An Unnecessarily Exhaustive Guide To The EuroLeague Final Eight

March 24th, 2011

In terms of the calibre of non-international competitive basketball, the EuroLeague is second in the world only to the NBA. That is to say, of all the leagues in the world not to excessively overuse snippets of Busta Rhymes songs, or turn nightly to the tortured genius of Kiss Cam, the EuroLeague is the best. If you love basketball, you’ll love watching the EuroLeague. If you love basketball and yet have never watched the EuroLeague, you haven’t tried hard enough. The first two group stages have been complete, and now the eight strongest teams enter a playoff-style format or head-to-head series. Ergo, 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 eight teams in this EuroLeague season. Teams list in no order other than alphabetical. Juan Carlos’s time in Memphis wasn’t all this happy. Barcelona As ever, Barcelona are absolutely stacked. They have three options at every position, populated almost exclusively with players who will be, who were, who could be, or who could have been, NBA players. To put that into some context, they have seven former NBA draft picks on the team, and two more players who played in it as undrafted free agents. That list doesn’t even include Jaka Lakovic, a high quality European guard, or Joe Ingles, a man who almost got drafted as recently as 18 months ago. There’s just reams of talent at every position, and the talent assault is relentless. The starting backcourt consistently consists of Ricky Rubio and Juan Carlos Navarro. Navarro has lost nothing; his assault of […]