A champ's Top 16 take: no jinx, no cold, no traffic
You know I want to be part of this blog on Euroleague.net, but I have to admit that after reading Jeff Nordgaard, I'm a little worried. Not because his blog is so good, which it is, but because of the way he ended the regular season: injured. When I was growing up in the U.S., there was always the Sports Illustrated cover jinx, meaning something bad happened to any athlete who made it onto that magazine's cover. I won't even talk about the Euroleague.net interview jinx I heard about, because I did an interview with those guys and came out OK. Now, I'm about to do this blog, and I read that Jeff got injured while he was doing it. I'm going to trust there is no jinx here and just go with it. I'll be blogging here at least three times during the Top 16, updating you on how my team, CSKA, is dealing with the challenge of staying champs. It won't be easy, we know that. But it will be easier on me if there's no jinx.
Hey, we went 13-1 in the regular season, but it was probably a bit more of a struggle than people realize. We have ups and downs like any other team. Fortunately, we didn't have to lose games while going through tough times. And that's what we try to do, win games always and make sure bad times don't get too bad. For us, the key factor is having talented players from top to bottom in our lineup. If someone goes down or has a bad game, we've got other guys who step in and make it look like nothing happened. That makes our team more special than others. And to top it off, our coach Ettore Messina has made all the players believe that defense wins championships. For us, it's all about defense. You can get some decent stiffs from the basketball word, teach them to play defense, and have a decent chance of winning something. We play such good defense, it doesn't matter sometimes how we score on offense.
So it's got nothing to do with the cold or the traffic jams in Moscow that affect teams when they come to play us here. I know that 95 out of 100 people like warm weather, so maybe that gets in the heads of visiting teams when they come here. And everyone heard about Napoli taking the metro to avoid traffic here. Napoli heard about the traffic and they made their own decision. And they didn't start that game well at all. Who's to say that wouldn't have happened the same way if they took the team bus like other teams? But in all honesty, I don't think other visiting teams will be taking the Moscow metro any time soon. The truth is, any teams that get bothered by the traffic or the weather here aren't concentrating enough already. They should be thinking first of how to beat Trajan Langdon, Matjaz Smodis, Theo Papaloukas, J.R. Holden, David Vanterpool, Alexey Savrasenko and the rest of our guys. If they are not thinking about us only, they already have a problem. Anyway, it's warm here this winter! The coldest it has been is right now, 10 below zero. Last year it was minus-30 or minus-40 all the time!
I think our Top 16 group is definitely the toughest. Honestly. Taking a look at the other groups, it's kind of funny that we ended up in this one instead of another, because I think the others would make it a little easier on us to reach the next round. But the bottom line is that to get to the Top 16, everyone has to be good. And now we're all 0-0 and starting over. I was just watching Joventut play in the Spanish League against Girona, the team that one of my best friends, Bootsy Thornton, plays for. I'll tell you: Joventut was up and down, run and gun, all athleticism and excitement, running, jumping, dunking. I saw one alley-oop, a one-handed pass from Ricky Rubio to Rudy Fernandez, and they didn't even get the dunk. But Rudy went so high up and got a hand on it, I though 'Oh, Lord!" They've got athleticism, that's for sure, and the way the stepped up in the first round shows why teams were afraid to meet them.
Then we have Olympiacos and Pini Gershon, of course, who knows our team well from all the battles with Maccabi. They just signed Sam Hoskins, who played here in Russia, and I can tell you he's a very good addition to that team. Sam can just flat-out score the ball from all over the court. People don't know him in the Euroleague, but he has been a good player in Russia. He was difficult for us to handle. You put him with their other guys, a lot of whom can hit from anywhere, and guys like Henry Domercant who get after it every game, and they are trouble. And that's not even considering that Macijauskas might be back for them. I hope he doesn't play again until we already advanced. Hopefully, we don't have to run around chasing him shooting three-pointers all the way from his apartment.
Partizan I haven't seen this year, but we were there last year, and I know the atmosphere they bring to this. They have great fan support and put a tough team on the court. Last season was difficult for them, but they came back and surprised a lot of people now, and won a lot of respect. They've got nothing to lose, and like I said, they start in first place like the rest of us. All teams go through ups and downs during a season, and teams that might not have been so good, but made it here, can hit their stride any minute. Everyone is dangerous now. Being in a killer group means we can't base anything on what happened in the regular season. We have to show all over again why we are considered the top team to beat.
POSTED BY
DAVID VANTERPOOL - MOSCOW, RUSSIA
DATE:
Friday, February 09, 2007