May 18, 2009
It’s playoff time throughout Europe and that’s no reason to slow down our output, but to come up with another Monday morning roundup of the most interesting stuff collected from around the web.
- Kristian asked if Pete Mickeal will play as Petko Mihailov in the short-term future. Well, the name change was shortened dramatically to only three days, as Spanish newspapers tell us that Mihailov’s Bulgarian passport is wrong. Let’s hope that Mickeal did not pay too much already to his Balkan intermediaries to get him the sesame.
- Arturas Jomantas hits the buzzer-beating three to send Game 4 of the Lithuanian finals into overtime.
- In the ACB Playoffs, Real Madrid started highly spectacularly, while the bad news is that Ricky Rubio got injured.
- Eurobasket.com reports that Zagreb may be a candidate for the Euroleague Final Four 2010, with the main opposition coming from London and the O2 Arena. While the second option is, of course, favored by Euroleague partner AEG, it looks like Euroleague officials tend to favor a city with more basketball tradition than London and could choose Zagreb.
- The Italian playoffs finally start this Monday after protests lodged by Fortitudo concerning its last game against Teramo. So the Italian League had the time to set up a nice playoff preview in PDF format with a multitude of stats from 1976 until today. You can find some interesting stats there, including most FTs made in a playoff game (Petar Naumoski with 23 in 2003); most turnovers (Frank Brickowski with 11 in 1982); and the highest gameday revenue (€418,062 Euro for PAF Bologna in 2001): This is a superb document that should be mandatory for every European League.
- Former NBA coach Don Casey gives his blog to Dan Peterson, coaching and commentating legend in Italy, to speak about the differences between the NBA and the Euroleague. Nothing really comes out of the discussions but Peterson made a nice statement: In fact, on the 10-man All-Euroleague team, there was only one American, Terrell McIntyre of MPS Siena. Recently, I tried to pick a 10-man all-star team of US players in Europe. Know what? I could not come up with 10 stars! That says a lot right there.
- This remembers me a bit of the discussion I had recently with my fellow blogger friend Gruebler from Germany. We tried to name five current players of the roster of Walter Tigers Tübingen, a German Bundesliga team. We did not succeed. And this was not the result of too many Rothaus beers…
- Not the typical Top 10 this week, but what about a season Top 30 dunks from former Missouri Tiger and current EWE Baskets Oldenburg player Rickey Paulding. Looks good, but the team also published a Top 10 of dunks for their center Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje.
- If you are more into nostalgia, you can see the various Top 10s in dunks, assists, alley-oops and tip-ins, tough shots, blocks and coast-to-coasts from the last 20 years of French finals. Be prepared to see some high-flying action from all-time greats like Richard Dacoury, Alain Digbeu, Boris Diaw , Conrad McRae (R.I.P.) and David Rivers.
Powered by Sidelines
This post was published on May 18, 2009
Leave a Reply