The Elephant Man is hyped! - RICARDO GREER - Welcome to EUROLEAGUE BASKETBALL

I know you all have missed me, not just in the blogosphere, but in the boxscore, too. What's up is that I missed our second French League game last weekend, which we lost, thanks to a head trauma concussion that I got in a collision in practice with Mickey Morandais. They rushed me off to the doctor and I came out of it with a concussion, a cut eye, a broken tooth and a split lip. The next day I looked like a boxer on the morning after a fight. My brother's been running around calling me The Elephant Man. I am lucky, really. Mickey and I bumped head to had at full speed going opposite directions in a fastbreak drill. My group was finishing, and I went to touch the baseline, but I didn't see him leaving. I hit his head, my head hit the floor, I passed out. It was a scary moment for the guys on the team, as well as for myself. The Lord bless us, though, and nothing serious happened. I practiced for the first time today, almost a week later, and it was interesting. I'm still trying to get the cobwebs out of my head. I'm still sporting a black eye and people on the street think I'm a boxer. But now I can look ahead and now we're getting ready to play Euroleague. And Mickey Morandais doesn't owe me anything but to make the first big three-pointer when I hit him with a pass so I get an assist. Then we'll be even.

The crazy part about our French League loss over the weekend at Heyres-Toulon is that we were up by 25 points with 15 minutes left in game. Then we only scored 10 points in fourth quarter. In the last 5 minutes, we shot 1 for 10. The game was at their place, so they came back and beat us, and now we're 1-1 in France. Our opener we won at home against Asvel, which finished behind us in third place last year. They got some good players this year and will be a team to be reckoned with later, so we were happy to beat them at home. I thought we looked OK. We had good contributions across the board. Our big guy, Victor Samnick, is playing real good right now, and LaMayne Wilson and John Cox are both getting at it. Rod Benson didn't play a lot of minutes, but we know he'll help us more when we get to the Euroleague. We're trying to get everyone on the same page, and we've got to get our confidence back in the next French League game this weekend. It's always tough when you lose a game like we did. Morale comes down a bit. But we looked good in practice, so we've just got to forget it and move on, get a big win Saturday and then welcome the Euroleague to town.

I've been talk to our guys who don't have Euroleague experience about the teams we're going to play in our group. I saw Panathinaikos play its first Greek League game on TV the other day. They've got a lot of smart, athletic and talented players. With Pau-Orthez a few years ago, we played Barcelona when Juan Carlos Navarro was there. He's a helluva player and it was something to play against him. Now they have Andre Barrett, a guy I played in college, and the big fella from Australia, David Andersen, so they are loaded. They have five guys on the bench who can start a lot of places. The only team in our group I haven't played against before is Montepaschi, but it sounds like they are really tough, too, and have been together a few years, which helps a lot. I do know Rimas Kaukenas, however, faced him when I was at University of Pittsburgh and he was at Seton Hall. So it's a mean group, but one good thing about the guys on our team, though, is they are not scared of anyone. On the court, it's five on five. They've got the names, we don't, which makes us the underdog. But it's always good to be the underdog. There's less pressure. You just go out and play basketball. No one expects us to win anyway, so we're going to just do all we can to get the best result. We've got Barcelona coming here for the first game. It's a big kick already for the fans in Nancy to have the team's first Euroleague game ever at home against Barcelona. The level of this group is incredible and everyone's hyped to get started, and that includes The Elephant Man!

POSTED BY

Ricardo Greer - Nancy, France