The annual All-Euroleague Team Vote has started, both for the fans and the journalists. While the Fan vote will be taken into consideration to the total score by 25%, the media people are still those who have the longer arm to go for the selection of the All-Euroleague Team.
Because the fan voting via Internet has become some kind of funny and without any value. It shows more the interest of people from several countries to their own players than becoming a real fair vote. Even if the Euroleague allows only one daily vote per IP, this did not bother the Lithuanian fans to go for a mass voting with results that look like votes in former communist countries.
As you can check the results at any time, here is the actual All-Euroleague Team according to the votes at Wednesday morning 10h00 CET:
PG – Sarunas Jasikevicius
SG – Arvydas Macijauskas
SF – Ramunas Siskauskas
PF – Ksystof Lavrinovic
C – Marijonas Petravicius
Well, you don’t need to be a huge basketball expert nor a geography freak to see that all these players are born in Lithuania. And if you check the rankings further, you will find as second best PG DeJuan Collins who plays in Kaunas, and even Jonas Maciulis and Marcus Brown as 4th and 5th in the SG/SF rankings.
The only players that break into the Lithuanian rankings are Maccabi Tel Aviv players (Yotam Halperin, Terrence Morris and Esteban Batista) and deserved All-Euroleague Team candidates like Willie Solomon, Lynn Greer and Nikola Pekovic.
You can’t do anything against it but to call this a vote for the All-Euroleague Team is not quite the correct name. If you call it most popular players of the euroleague.net readers would be way closer to what the result actually is. Or even just call it: Which countrymen have the most time and will to vote for their local basketball players?
So if you want to vote, just follow the link here in order to give the other players some kind of chance to be in the race.
