European Prospects

Tomorrow Monday starts the 7th edition of the Baltic Sea Basketball Cup for U16 and U18 Girls and Boys Basketball. The participating countries are Latvia, Finland, Sweden and the hosts from Estonia. This year, the U18 games can be watched online as Kullaauk.ee broadcasts live from Tallinn.

Here is a short list of the players to watch in the U18 competition. For Estonia, the main players to follow are Janari Joesaar, a 1m97 tall forward and the PG Rait-Riivo Laane. Laane gets already solid minutes for his team in Estonian Senior League where he is the Starting PG of Rapla. Martin Paasoja is also seeing minutes in the EKML, he is the sixth man for Parnu.

The U18 team from Latvia will be lead by Ojars Silins (Regiio Emilia, Italy) while Oskars Reinfelds (Canarias Basketball Academy, Spain) will rest after the tournament with CBA in Holland and Kaspars Vecvagars and Elvis Saulitis will not be present as they play in the NIJT in l’Hospitalet for Zalgiris Kaunas and BC Khimki respectively. Other players to watch for the Latvian tam could be Janis Berzins and Klavs Strazdins. Berzins is 2m00 tall shooter who is playing good minutes for Valmiera in the Baltic league while Strazdins has progressed well from year to year.The full roster of the Latvian Team can be found here.

For Finland U18, the players to watch are Mikael Herbert, Daniel Dolenc and Joonas Caven. Both Herbert and Caven are players with interesting upside so it will be interesting to see how they have developed over the last months.The full roster can be found here.

Sweden comes to Tallinn without a large number of players that are currently active throughout Europe. Marcus Eriksson (Manresa, Spain), William Magarity (Biella, Italy) and Nicholas Spires (FC Barcelona, Spain) will not be with the team while Jonathan Person will most likely be their scoring leader while Frederik Andersson should step up in the absence of the major starters. Sweden also has big hopes on their 1994 born players like Hannes Erhart or Jacob Magnusson. The full roster can be found here.

For the U16 tournament, the following players look to be the most interesting: Kristaps Porzingis (Latvia), Sten Olmre (Estonia), Rainer Pastimäe (Estonia), Jacob Johansson (Sweden), Lukas Bergäng (Sweden), Filip Kovacek (Sweden), Johan Löfberg (Sweden), Alexander Madsen (Finland) or Oskar Michelsen (Finland).

Official Website of the Tournament: www.basket.ee/bsbc

The U18 Boys/Girls games of the Baltic Sea Cup can be followed through LIVE Stream only for 5€: http://www.kullaauk.ee/basket