European Prospects

The 2011 edition of the Adidas Eurocamp is history. Overall, the level of the camp was not one of the bests form the last years as most of the potential lottery and first round picks decided to skip the event which is a trend that we as an observer of course do not like. However, this gives the opportunity to some of the more unknown prospects to be present and show their skillset. Additionally, the camp got a bit a victim of its own success as the gym was so packed over the three days and more and more coaches, media, agents and other visitors come to the Italian city.

The day started with the usual drills and workouts in the morning where the coaches put a lot of effort into 4-4 situations on half-court. The following speech by Dwight Howard was more or less reserved for the players as the Orlando Magic center was not equipped with a microphone so that the people in the stands could not understand a lot of what he was saying.  After a little break, the first game of the day has been played between the Serbian U19 National Team and a Benetton Treviso U22 team selection.

The Serbian team might have won the game but its squad still does not look really well oiled so far. With Nenad Miljenovic skipping the game, Aleksandar Cvetkovic started this time for the Serbian but he did not really had a major impact on the game. It were more the players from the 2nd row who showed their skills like the long Nemanja Besovic who had 10pts, 6rebs, 2blks but 5tos while Bogdan Bogdanovic and Nikola Siladji also scored a couple of baskets. On the Italian side, it were the “foreigners” who were the only ones who stood out as the former camper Jakub Wojciechowski had 16pts but a terrible 5/14 FGs and this year’s camp Rookie Samuel Deguara had the best valorization of the game with 13pts, 8rebs, 3stls for a 19 val.

After an extended lunch break, we skipped the first game of the afternoon where it were the usual suspects like Tomas Satoransky that showed the best games. You have also to mention the skilled big men Dusan Cantekin who had 8pts and 7rebs or the more physical Turkish inside player Ilkan Karaman who finished the game with 8pts and 6rebs. Lots of the players of both teams already skipped this game as well in order to be fresh for the final All-Star game of the night or because of some injuries.

The next game, for which no more stats were available was as well a confirmation for some of the players that had a good camp in Treviso. Mindaugas Kuzminskas played very well again as well as Dogus Balbay who can be considered as a Top3 PG of the event. While Ousmane “Sarra” Camara underlined his status as the best French player of the camp (by just seeing what he did in the camp and not looking up his regular season games), Paul Lacombe and Edwin Jackson showed that they are both talented guards as well.

Surprisingly enough, the final game between the Croatian U19 National Team and an adidas Eurocamp All-Star selection was one of the best team performances of the whole camp despite being the last game of the event. While Croatia continued to play without Dario Saric because of some shoe deal contract issues, the All-Stars dominated the game right from the start due to a great range of guards that gave no chance to the Croatian defense. Additionally, you saw the team execute set-plays very well in order to get open shots a quantity of times and their specialists like Jackson or David Jelinek executed these opportunities perfectly. Tomas Satoransky was once present in a different role than usual as he played great defense on the Croatian wunderkind Mario Hezonja and kept him out of the game more or less over long stretches.

That’s it so far for our daily reports but we will publish in the next days a full list of all the camp measurements, shooting charts as well as scouting reports on the players of the camp.