Taking temperatures around the Euroleague
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| Vladimir Stankovic, Euroleague.net |
Veteran sportswriter and Euroleague.net collaborator Vladimir Stankovic has been following the best basketball on the continent longer than almost anyone journalist, writing for decades about the sport in major publications in both Serbia and Spain. For the new 2009-10 season, he now offers the first of a series of opinion blogs about what's happening on and off the court in the Euroleague.
Getting cold in Moscow
It's not a question of the Moscow weather. It's not so cold yet, but for fans of CSKA, a glance at the standings, where the Russian champs are 1-2 in Group C with a -21 point difference overall, provokes a serious chill. Of course, CSKA lost in Tel Aviv also in its best years, so a defeat there to Maccabi is no surpris in itself, but at the same time, the stats say something more. CSKA scored only 54 points, and Ramunas Siskauskas was the only player in double digits, with 12. No CSKA player had a performance index rating higher than 9! The whole team's index rating was 49, the same as only one player - Darjus Lavrinovic of Real Madrid - had in Week 1.
The injury to Matjaz Smodis is without doubt important, but it can't explain CSKA's bad start by itself. CSKA would be 0-3 had it not won the opening game against Maroussi in Athens on a miraculous triple by Viktor Khryapa. The second week, CSKA lost at home to Lottomatica Roma. The team's scoring average after three weeks is 63.3 points, very little for a team that has Siskauskas, Khryapa, J.R. Holden, Zoran Planinic, Trajan Langdon and Anton Ponkrashov. This team has plenty of quality with which to lift itself up. I hope that after seven straight Final Fours and two Euroleague titles, CSKA knows how to react to adversity.
Getting warm in Italy
If the slow start of CSKA is, right now, the negative surprise of the season, the start of the season by the Italian teams is the positive surprise. If Montepaschi Siena being 3-0 doesn't surprise anyone, the same record for Roma is certainly less expected - and a good reminder that budgets are not everything. Armani Jeans Milano is 1-2, but the way it is playing also gives reason for optimism. Maybe it's early to say "the Italians are back", but there's no doubt their start is good news. Italian basketball recently has lived through a crisis that culminated in the national team's elimination from the last EuroBasket, and as a consequence, it's absence from the next World Championships in Turkey - all this within five years after having won the silver medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. But no crisis lasts forever, and here's hoping that the start to this Euroleague season means at that least that Italian basketball is on its way back.
Across the continent
An opposite example to that of Italy are the teams of the Adriatic Leaue. Cibona is 0-3 with a -72-point difference overall, Olympica 0-3 at -32 and Partizan 1-2 at -11. To start 0-3 in groups of six teams with only seven games left is very dangerous, especially with two home losses, as Olimpija has. Looking at the other countries, Spain is doing the best. Barcelona got to 3-0 against Zalgiris in Kaunas despite not having Juan Carlos Navarro and Gianluca Basile. Unicaja is undefeated at 3-0, too. Real Madrid and Caja Laboral are sitting at 2-1, bringing up the likelihood that all four will pass through to the Top 16. The case of Unicaja is very strange, since the same team is 0-5 in the Spanish League.
Two masters meet in Madrid
Speaking of Spain, this week's big game in Madrid brought together again Ettore Messina and Zeljko Obradovic, two great coaches whose rivalry - as well as their friendship - has very much marked the Euroleague in recent years. The owners of 11 continental club titles out of the last 18, tied with two each over the last four years, they are luxuries for their clubs, for their native countries, Italy and Serbia, and for European basketball, too.
Their rivalry reminds me a bit of old times, at the start of what was then called the European Cup. If Alexander Gomelskiy with ASK Riga did not have a true rival before him as that team won the first three European titles, he certainly matched up with some tough competitors in the 1960s. First came the legendary Pedro Ferrandiz of the great Real Madrid, soon followed on the bench of Ignis Varese by Aleksandar Nikolic. The rivalry between Messina and Obradovic reminds me most of the one between Gomelskiy and Nikolic: great coaches, visionaries, authorities, gurus.... When the Madrid press asked who were the coaches they learned most from, Obradovic said Nikolic and Ivkovic, while Messina said Nikolic, Sandro Gamba and Dan Petersen.
Great masters, friends and rivals. What luck to have them in the Euroleague!
POSTED BY
Vladimir Stankovic, Barcelona
DATE:
Friday, November 06, 2009