Hi everyone! I hope you are doing well… I am sure that you are looking forward for the Turkish Airlines Euroleague Final Four tip off… We sure are! We are marching towards the end of our preparations for the semifinal against CSKA Moscow. We are all ready; Mike Batiste is back after recovering from his injury and we have been spending a lot of time at OAKA.

We have spent some time watching video, but we work a lot on the court too in order to prepare ourselves for the games to come in the best possible way. Our coaches have done everything to prepare us as far as scouting goes. We have a very difficult mission ahead, but in a Euroleague semifinal there is no room for favorites.

CSKA has a full roster. Its road through this Euroleague season was steady and we know that we have to do our best in order to claim a positive result. It’s a tough mission for sure, but we are optimistic. We believe in our team and our potential and we’ll do the best we can to get to the final.

We have the chance to defend our title and we want to defend our title. We have a lot of players that have been to at least one Final Four in the past, so we know what we have to do. But we are not the only team out of the four with experienced players. CSKA has players who know well what the Final Four means and the same goes for... leer m�s

Welcome Back to all the Turkish Airlines Euroleague and basketball fans around the world. Once again, I am Kyle Hines, forward/center for Olympiacos , writing you from beautiful Athens, Greece. After impatiently waiting for the past 30 days, it is finally………FINAL FOUR TIME!!!!!!! After all the hard and long practices and tough games that have followed us throughout this Euroleague season, it is finally time for my teammates and I travel to Istanbul, Turkey to compete for the Euroleague title.

When I last wrote on this blog, we had defeated Montepaschi Siena in the Euroleague playoffs to clinch a trip to the Euroleague Final Four. Since then we had almost one month to prepare to go to Istanbul. The first step in our team's preparation for the Final Four was the Greek League playoffs. We played both the quarterfinal and semifinal rounds of those playoffs. Even though we were clearly the favorites in both of those series, we wanted to use those games to help us to become better prepared for our matchup against Barcelona in the semifinal of the Final Four.

Barcelona has been the top team throughout this Euroleague season. They have one of the most experienced groups in all of the Euroleague and their core players have been together for many years. They have one of the best players in Euroleague, Juan Carlos Navarro, and a very strong and deep frontcourt. Coming into the game, they will be considered the favorites by many people, but to our team that doesn't mean anything. We are comfortable playing the role of underdogs and we all know that anything is possible one game.
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Ok, so the brass over at Euroleague.net have asked me to write a little checkup blog for you guys and I told them I would be happy to oblige. I obviously can't tell y'all about the three new players we have signed for the Final Four, or the full-court triangle-and-two defense we plan on implementing throughout the weekend, but I should be able to give you some other insight into what has been going on over in Barcelona these last couple days.

Yes, the preparation for Olympiacos is a work in progress. Our coaches have done a great job in managing the practices the last couple weeks so we can prepare for both the Turkish Airlines Euroleague Final Four and the Liga Endesa domestic games (double-bonus for sponsor shout-outs!). And while we already have a pretty good understanding of the very good Olympiacos team we will face on Friday, we still have several days of practice to try and become even more prepared. The supremely talented Xavi Montolio has been tasked with organizing and managing the barrage of family and friend ticket requests, figuring out team and family transportation to and from Istanbul, the buses, the hotels, and the obviously large demand for CJ Wallace memorabilia. His job is not easy, but as I expected, so far it appears that everything is operating smooth and sound.

Juan Carlos Navarro, Fran Vazquez, Chuck Eidson, Joe Ingles and Victor Sada: What do these solid individuals have in common? Think long and hard. The answer is they all have recently had their hair cut. And yes, CJ Wallace will be joining this elite group of players tomorrow. My hair can no longer be... leer m�s

Hi everyone! Sasha Kaun of CSKA Moscow here, getting ready for our trip to Istanbul and another chance to become Euroleague champion. I say "another" because this will be my third Final Four. In my rookie season with CSKA, we made it to Berlin in 2009 and went all the way to the last seconds before losing the final to Panathinaikos. The next year in Paris, we went down in the semifinals to Barcelona, the eventual champions. Not only are both those teams back with us to this year's Final Four, but we are playing one in the semis and could end up playing both. I am not really a revenge-minded person, but beating both those teams would feel good after losing to both in my first two Final Fours. But more important than revenge, that would mean we would be Euroleague champs!

I would say that I can't wait to get to Istanbul, which is true, but right now our team is spending our last days of preparation as we should: focusing more and more on the difficul task at hand. I think we are in good shape, and of course, everyone knows what is at stake as we prepare. We just had a good tournament in Lithuania and became champs of the VTB United League there, so that definitely boosts our confidence going into a tournament like the Final Four. Everyone is excited, because it's the culmination of the season, something we all worked for a long time, and... leer m�s