Euroleague.net's editorial director, Frank Lawlor, has spent most of his career as a basketball journalist in Europe and his native United States, writing about and interviewing the top players in the world on both continents for more than two decades. In terms of practical basketball experience, he was a head coach in the Spanish second division for one fortuitous season in the late 1990s. Frank's new blog will draw on all that background to enhance the Turkish Airlines Euroleague experience for you, the fans.
It was quite humorous to hear an NBA owner speak publically and at length last week about hijacking the Olympics and the World Championships in order to get money back on his investment in players. Many fallacies in his argument have been pointed out already, the main one being that the players he employs are not "his" to own and exploit for return on investment 365 days a year just because a lucky ping-pong ball fell to him once. As most contracts and payment schedules make quite clear, players are free to do what they want out of season, short of taking extreme physical risks. Playing the sport they do the rest of the year is not considered an extreme physical risk like, say, bungee jumping. Naturally enough, what the players often wish to do is go home to represent their countries by playing alongside the buddies of their generation with whom they learned to love this sport. This owner thinks the fans who want to see that national team should pay him because he employs one or more of those players for much of the year. It would perhaps be a more interesting discussion if he raised that player from youth programs to cadets to juniors, teaching him every day and nurturing him along, month by month, year by year, until he became a pro. But he didn't. Other people put in that work - starting with the player himself, but often including clubs, national teams, schools and community sports programs in that player's country. Imagine if those grass-roots nurturers of basketball started applying their own return-on-investment criteria to everything they do to grow the sport's stars!
For me, something lost in the largely negative reaction to the owner's statement was the other hijacking he implied. Not hijacking the Olympics, the World Championships or the players themselves, but hijacking the sport of basketball as it's played in most of the world, the team game as exemplified in the Euroleague with all its amazing moments so far this season. What we are seeing in the Top 16 is the same passion that gets carried over summer after summer into the Olympics and World Championships. That passion has a lot to do with how the game is played around the world, which is to say team first, second and third. The Euroleague has supplied more players to national teams than any competition in the world for the last decade. And if you count youth programs they graduated from, you can almost say that a majority of players at the Olympics and World Championships owe something of their professional careers to European clubs. The environment that nurtured them when they were young and unknown probably explains why many players are so ready to rejoin their national teams summer after summer, to play the game as they learned it, with a togetherness that takes the sport to a higher level. It's not a money thing; it's a devotion thing: not everyone would understand.
Crunching numbers
Here's some further proof of what a special season this has become, and with so much of it still left to play.
- Wednesday of Top 16 Week 2 featured a sweep of four road winners on the same night, just the second time that has happened since the Top 16 came into being back in the 2001-02 season. There have been a couple of other nights on which four road teams won, but more games were played and at least one home team won, too. The only other time that at least four games were played and all were won by visiting teams was on March 20, 2002, when Scavolini Pesaro, Efes Pilsen, Kinder Bologna and CSKA Moscow all took Top 16 Week 3 games away from home teams. Last week, almost nine years later, it was Efes Pilsen, Lietuvos Rytas, Olympiacos and Real Madrid disappointing all the home fans at Euroleague arenas. Back in 2002, the fascination continued into the next night, Thursday, when three more road teams also won, making it 7 of 8 for that week, still a record in the Top 16. What's more, the week's only home winner, Barcelona, did so by 76-75 on a buzzer-beater by a certain born winner who is still going strong in the Euroleague. You guessed it: Sarunas Jasikevicius.
- Also last week, there were four games decided by 3 or fewer points - Union Olimpija 67-68 Barcelona, Partizan 76-79 Efes Pilsen, Caja Laboral 86-89 Lietuvos Rytas and Fenerbahce Ulker 75-73 Power Electronics Valencia - for just the third time in Top 16 history. To give you an idea how rare that is, consider that there have been 56 weeks of Top 16 action over nine-plus seasons, including this season's two so far. Less than one-fifth of them, 11, had even as many as three games decided by 3 or fewer points. The only ones that matched last week's drama were Week 1 of the 2007-08 Top 16 and Week 5 back in 2003-04.
One way to look at it
It's a little overdue, but one way to look at the effects of the longer, 6.75-meter three-point distance this season is to see the overall drop in how many players master that shot now as compared to previous seasons, when the distance was 6.25 meters. The regular season witnessed a 20% drop from a year ago in the number of players who averaged at least one three-pointer per game. The drop was higher, almost 26.5%, in players averaging 1.5 triples per game and a skyrocketing 48% when it comes to those who averaged 2 or more a game. The differences are not as stark, but similar, for the 2008-09 regular season, and if you go back one more, to 2007-08, quite shocking: there are now 60% fewer players making 2 or more three-pointers per game than just three seasons ago. No one is close to 3 per game, but the top three-point shooter so far, Mirza Teletovic of Caja Laboral, averages 2.67 and has tied the single-game mark of 9 triples made - so give him time. Everyone kind of predicted drops of some kind with the longer distance. Neither was it unexpected to see less three-pointers attempted, 4,693 among all 24 regular season teams this season as opposed to 5,634 last season. But that's just a 17.5% drop in attempts, while the drops in the numbers of shooters who excel is higher. In other words, even the best shooters are trying and making fewer threes. Now it will be interesting to see how long it takes them to narrow that half-meter gap and get back to the numbers they had at the shorter distance.
| Players' average three-pointers |
| 2010-11 |
2009-10 |
2008-09 |
2007-08 |
| (10 regular season games) |
(10 regular season games) |
(14 regular season games) |
(14 regular season games) |
| 1 or more = 63 players |
1 or more = 79 players |
1 or more = 73 players |
1 or more = 78 players |
| 1.50 or more = 25 |
1.50 or more = 34 |
1.50 or more = 34 |
1.50 or more = 36 |
| 2 or more = 9 |
2 or more = 16 |
2 or more = 13 |
2 or more = 20 |
| 3 or more = 0 |
3 or more = 1 |
3 or more = 0 |
3 or more = 2 |
Sportingbet MVP of the Month alert
For those of you who were looking for a January MVP this month, Euroleague Basketball decided to wait and make the award including the first two days of February, after which there comes a one-week break in the Top 16. In the same way, the MVP for February will include games of the sixth and final week of the Top 16, on March 3 and 4. Then, the MVP for March will include all of the playoffs, which in the case of reaching their limits, will see the first four games played at the end of March and Game 5 played in April. The thinking was that observing the natural breaks in the competition would be faired to the MVP candidates and easier to understand for the fans. As such, there will be a monthly MVP for the first half of the Top 16, another for the second half, and another for the Playoffs.
POSTED BY
Frank Lawlor - Euroleague.net
DATE:
Thursday, February 03, 2011