Healthy, hungry and here!

May 25, 2012

Hi, Euroleague fans. As someone who worked their way up a long ladder to be here, I am very excited to be going into the Euroleague playoffs with Caja Laboral. I came over to Europe from a small university and moved year by year from the third division in Spain, to the second, then the first. Now, to be with a team going into the Euroleague playoffs, with the whole continent paying attention, and beyond, is very exciting. It's a great opportunity for any player. Not many chances like this come up. And I think any player would agree with me that we all want to prove ourselves on this stage.

I can say another thing that everyone will agree on: what a way to arrive! Our game to qualify to the playoffs, well, I've never been a part of something like that. It was a once-in-a-lifetime comeback, being down 12 with a couple minutes left against Cibona. Some of us on the bench were thinking: Is this it? Then, all of a sudden, we got some turnovers, some three-pointers, and we were down by just 4 points with a minute left. Everyone was into the game, we got to overtime as we hoped and we somehow pulled off the qualification. The mood among us afterwards was disbelief. How did we do that? It was amazing, that's for sure. But we're now among the top eight teams in Europe, it's a new stage, and we are ready to go again.

Of course, our opponents from CSKA has a lot of guys who have been together awhile. They were here in Vitoria earlier in the season, and they really played well together to get what was a big win for them. They all know their roles and they have great players. That will make it tough on us. They can hurt you in so many ways, whether it's with point guards like Holden and Planinic, a shooting guard like Langdon or a small forward like Siskauskas. They are all very dangerous, so we will have to play defense well. They have a swagger to them, play with a lot of confidence. It's tough sometimes to read a team like that that, full of veterans who won championships. But by playing against experienced, proven winners is how you make your own success, too. All we can do is keep doing what got us here, working hard and proving we belong. As long as we prepare right, everything will take care of itself.

Playing for this club, the Final Four is almost an expectation, the goal we all had to start the season. That's part of being on a winning club with a lot of history. All season, this team has been through a lot, a crazy amount of injuries. My own required two surgeries on the same ankle since I signed in the summer. Almost every other player on the team seems to have missed a month or two. Almost the whole season, we've been missing one or two players, and sometitmes three at a time. We've been through a lot, but we are coming out of it now, and I think we're a dangerous team. We can play now like we have nothing to lose. Obviously, we're a new team with a lot of young guys, but for that reason we are hungry to win championships. Many of us haven't done that yet, so we are very hungry. We found a way to get this far, and now it's time to take another step.

POSTED BY

Brad Oleson - Caja Laboral

DATE:

Monday, March 22, 2010