Old friends, new enemies: opening thoughts

February 09, 2012

Tomas Van den Spiegel, Prokom Trefl Sopot

Video: Tomas Van den Spiegel

The circus is coming back to town… The first day of a new school year is Monday!… That is how I - and with me all of my Euroleague colleagues, I'm sure - have been feeling for the last days. Of course, the domestic leagues are important, too, but they are not the same thing. The Euroleague is special, and I'm not getting paid to say this. Special for me because I've changed teams over the summer. I moved from the noisy, chaotic and crazy - but don't get me wrong, also very charming - city of Moscow, to the quiet, peaceful and relaxing beach town of Sopot, Poland. If you look at all 24 Euroleague teams, a bigger change is hard to imagine. But I enjoy every minute of being here. Getting to practice takes me about 4 minutes, the mall is just around the corner and the airport within 15 minutes. That used to be 20, 60 and 120 minutes, respectively, last season. The air is clean and the beaches are beautiful. Life is easy here, so all we have to do now is come up with some results on the court to make it even better…

Although injuries made us struggle throughout our preseason, we do have a great team that should know what it takes to win championships. We count one Olympic champ in Ruben Wolkowiski, one world champion in Milan Gurovic, two European champions in Gurovic and Donatas Slanina, one NBA finalist in Travis Best, a double Saporta cup winner in Tomas Masiulis, and one Euroleague champion in myself, not to mention all the domestic league titles we have collected between us. What's even more important than that is that we like each other already. And in our difficult moments we always have Milan Gurovic, who comes up with one of his numerous imitations that kill everybody. He already does a perfect Tomas Pacesas and Christos Harissis, and the other day he gave me an imitation of Dejan Bodiroga shooting free throws that made me roll on the floor. From having played with Dejan in Rome, I can tell you the imitation was perfect. Milan should already plan on his stand-up comedy career after basketball.

On the day of the Euroleague Draw, I was in Athens together with Theo Papaloukas, who I've become real close friends with in my two years at CSKA. Suddenly, I started getting messages on my mobile from all over, telling me CSKA was in our group. No problem, I had thought about that already. But hearing later that we would holst CSKA in the Euroleague opener in Sopot really get me excited. It will be a great chance for us to show that we are ready for this Euroleague season, playing against the main force inEuropean basketball today. I know that Coach Messina has already been thinking about this game for a while, and he probably started talking to the team about it early last week, to get everybody fully ready. It will be up to us to do the same thing. In the meantime, I have been trying to find out some more about their preparation, bugging Trey, JR, Dave and Matjaz on Skype and mobiles all week...

Our Euroleague regular season group looks so hard that every game will count big-time to make it through to the Top 16. With CSKA, Tau, Olympiakos and Siena, we have four teams with recent Final Four experience and/or ambitions. Adding Zalgiris (always tough), Virtus Bologna (always special for me, having played for Fortitudo), Olimpija (one of the toughest away games in all the Eroleague) and us, that makes a hell of a group. It reminds me a lot of the 2004 Final Four, where the four teams came out of the same regular season group. So let's hope that it turns out the same way this year and that we are one of the five making it through to the Top 16.

POSTED BY

Tomas Van den Spiegel, Sopot

DATE:

Sunday, October 21, 2007