Fair play on the road to the playoffs

May 25, 2012

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 offers a series of opinion blogs about what's happening on and off the court in the Euroleague.

The Top 16 ended just like it had begun: with excitement, drama, overtimes, surprises and score changes. The Euroleague showed its maturity and complete trust in its teams with the decision not to play all the games at the same time, and the teams responded with fair play. Congratulations to everyone. The saying goes that history is written by the winners. Therefore, the glory of the playoffs will be for Top 16 group winners Regal FC Barcelona, Olympiacos, Maccabi Electra, CSKA Moscow and their second-place followers Partizan, Caja Laboral, Real Madrid and Asseco Prokom. Especially for the Serbian and Polish champs, the accomplishment is grand because of their limited budgets and year-to-year roster changes. We will analyze the playoffs shortly, but first I want to tell you a story that happened almost 40 years ago that I remembered while watching this week's unbelievable ending to Group H.

Overtime stories

When Marcelinho Huertas of Caja Laboral missed the first of a pair of free throws with 12 seconds to go on Thursday, few people at the Fernando Buesa Arena realized that overtime against Cibona was at that moment Caja Laboral's only option of making the Quarterfinal Playoffs. See, a one-point win over Cibona would not have been enough for Caja Laboral to advance, because at that moment BC Khimki was beating Olympiacos by 12 to 14 points, enough to leave Caja Laboral out due to its deficit in global point differential with Khimki. The two teams were to end tied with 3-3 records, also having beaten each other by identical 11-point margins. The next tie-breaker between them was their overall Top 16 point differences. In the end, after the overtime that was forced by the missed free throw from Huertas, Caja Laboral won by 12 points, which combined with the result in Moscow, was enough to eliminate Khimki by 5 points and push through to the playoffs.

As I was saying, this overtime win reminded me of an overtime avoided in similar fashion 39 years ago. It's a story widely known by those with enough years and good memory, but since there're always young and newer fans of basketball, they deservre to hear that famous story, too. In December of 1961, in the quarterfinals of the old Champions Cup, Ignis Varese and Real Madrid were playing in Italy. With a few seconds to go and an 80-80 tie in the score, with his top player Clifford Luyk having just fouled out, Real Madrid coach Pedro Ferrandiz called for a timeout and developed his master plan: the play he drew up was designed for Lorenzo Alocen to score, yes...but not for Real Madrid. Instead, Ferrandiz had Alocen turn around and score for Varese. Said and done. The crowd, on first reaction, believed that the player had committed a mistake and the basket for the 82-80 win by Varese was celebrated in the stands. But soon, everybody realized that it was no mistake at all. It was a well-thought decision that provoked great protests in the arena, from which Real Madrid, for its own safety, soon had to be escorted by the police.

The reason for this famous decision was pure logic in the mind of Don Pedro: "If we made it into overtime without Luyk, we were going to lose by a fair amount of points. If we only lost by two points, we would be able to beat that in Madrid in the second game." And that is definitely what happened. At home, Real Madrid won by 83-62. Of course, it wasn't a very clean decision, but Pedro Ferrandiz didn't break the rules which, by the way, were swiftly changed by FIBA after that. It was a way to avoid overtime and elimination that will always be in the history books of European basketball. The opposite place in that history now belongs to the overtime in Vitoria, combined with the Moscow drama.

Playoffs: A pair of classics

Since the 2004-05 season, when the Euroleague introduced the Playoffs before the Final Four, only 16 teams total have managed to play this phase. Six of them (Fenerbahce Ulker, Scavolini, Benetton Basket, the old Ulker, Unicaja and Dynamo Moscow) did it once. And only two teams, CSKA Moscow and Caja Laboral, have managed to play in all six editions of the Playoffs. Barcelona, Olympiacos, Panathinaikos and Maccabi have played in this phase five times. Real Madrid and Partizan have made it three times, while Efes Pilsen and Montepaschi Siena made it twice each.

While CSKA and Caja Laboral, as well as the teams who only missed one year, show great stability, the other group of former Playoff teams haven't had it so good. In Italy, Benetton and Scavolini have been living for several years now under the shadow of Montepaschi. Ulker had to merge with Fenerbahce, Unicaja is going through a results crisis, while Dynamo Moscow, only with Russian players now, has the sole goal of surviving as a club. Efes Pilsen and Montepaschi, two stable clubs, have missed this time, but I am sure they will be in the fight for the Playoffs again next year. The stability of a club is not only a matter of money.

The numbers

Against Zalgiris, CSKA played its 199th game in the Euroleague since 2000. The first Playoff game against Caja Laboral will be its 200th. The Russian champ leads the ranking of teams with the most wins (156, 13 more than second-placed Caja Laboral, which has played many more games, 217) and also the ranking of wins percentage, 78.4%. CSKA is also the team with the most road wins, 72 out of 101, or 72.3%, and also shares the top spot with Caja Laboral on home wins. Both have 83, but CSKA's percentaje is higher, 84.7%, as it has played seven fewer home games.

With 17 points against Zalgiris, CSKA's Trajan Langdon entered the 2,000 club with a total 2,005 points in his Euroleague career. The club features The Magnificent Seven at this point: Marcus Brown (2,693), Juan Carlos Navarro (2,338), Nikola Vujcic (2,325), Jaka Lakovic (2,226), Luis Scola (2,054) and Langdon. The next candidate in line to enter the club is Barcelona guard Gianluca Basile, who currently has 1,961 points.

Basile and CSKA's J.R. Holden are the leaders on the games-played list (193 each) and also in three-pointers made: 374 and 350, respectively...Holden has played a total 6,052 minutes and 20 seconds (an average of 31.21 per game)...With his three steals against Zalgiris, Langdon surpassed the 200-steals mark (202) and is seventh in the all-time standings...To close the season, Unicaja played its 100th Euroleague game since 2000 against Asseco Prokom, and celebrated with a win.

POSTED BY

Vladimir Stankovic, Euroleague.net

DATE:

Saturday, March 13, 2010