Where Are They Now, 2010; Part 59
April 21st, 2010
– Sofoklis Schortsanitis Big Sofo has supposedly lost almost 150 pounds. This is good. The number is presumably exaggerated a bit, but whatever the amount he’s lost really is, it’s still good that he’s lost it. He needed to. Last year, he was simply too fat play; allegedly nearer to 500lbs than 400, and seemingly trying his best to undermine the team that continues to persist with him perhaps long after they shouldn’t, Sofo appeared in only 95 minutes all season, and fouled once in every four of them. How a man can get as big as he did is hard to fathom, and how a professional athlete (at least ostensibly) can get that big is simply mind-blowing. But it happened. Sofo has always had a huge frame, yet with all that fat on him, he was heeeeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEEEYYOOOOOOOOGE. You could feel your head being drawn closer to the screen, such was his gravitational pull. He was the biggest basketball player I have ever seen. And it was reflected in his play. This year, however, Sofoklis has turned up to play. Perhaps motivated by the impending expiration of his contract, Sofoklis has lost much weight and is an unstoppable force in the Greek league. He plays only 13.3 minutes in Greek league play, partly because Olympiacos keep winning in blowouts, partly because his stamina still isn’t great, partly because he offers so little defensively other than the foul, and partly of Olympiacos’s surfeit of big men. (When you have all of Sofo, Ioannis Bourousis, Nikola Vujcic, Linas Kleiza, Andreas Glyniadakis and Loukas Mavrokefalidis, you might as well use them). Yet in that short space of time, Sofo averages a whopping 9.4 points per game, shooting 69% from the field. He is unstoppably strong in the paint; there’s no else that big […]
Where Are They Now, 2009: Part 46
March 4th, 2009
– Renaldas Seibutis is part of a deep Iurbentia Bilbao team, averaging 10.7 points and 1.6 rebounds in the EuroCup, alongside 6.6 points and 1.7 rebounds in the Spanish league. – Now is the time to refamiliarise yourself with Warriors great, Mladen Sekularac. Mladen was drafted in the second round by the Mavericks back in 2002, coming off a season that saw him average 17.6 points in the Saporta Cup, the predecessor of sorts to the EuroCup. From there, Sekularac (whose name I’m finding really hard to abridge) went to Bologna in Italy, where he didn’t play much and was released mid-season. In 2003/04, Rac averaged a more modest 10 ppg back in the Adriatic League, and then saw his rights traded to Golden State as a minor part of the Erick Dampier trade. It was at that moment that it all started to go south. Sekularac had signed with Buducnost to start the 2004/05 season, but left after they stopped paying him; he then signed in December of ’04 with Apollon in Greece, but appeared in only two games, totalling 0 points. Since then, Kula has been in Belgium, where a series of injuries have seen him go from the fifth-leading scorer in the country in 2005/06 to a fringe starter in the present day. Sek is now 28, and has not panned out despite once being touted as his nation’s best prospect for a generation. And guess what? Right now, he’s currently injured. Larac signed a two-year contract with Charleroi this summer, and then got injured in his debut, back in October. He hasn’t played since, and has all of two points to his name on the year. Bad times. – Mouhamed Sene was waived by the Thunder on trade deadline day to accommodate Thabo Sefolosha. The team […]
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 […]
