European Prospects

This week, several important preparation tournaments for the upcoming European Championships will be held. We take a closer look to two of them and give you some indications about other tournaments to follow.

The first tournament to start will be the Turk Atakol Tournament for U20 National Teams in Turkey. Istanbul will host Latvia, Russia, Czech Republic, France, Ukraine and the organizers of Turkey for a U20 Tournament. After having won the EuroEssonne Tournament at home with 2 victories over Sweden and Germany and a defeat against Slovenia, the French team around Evan Fournier can be considered as one of the favorites for this event. Fournier will get some support by interesting players like Leo Westermann, Rudy Gobert or the two NCAA players Mathis Keita and Will Yeguete as well as the 2m22 big man Vincent Pourchot.

The hosts from Turkey played some preparation games already against the same French team and came back home with three defeats. But their main asset Furkan Aldemir is still recuperating from his injury and should be closer to 100% for this tournament than he was in the preparation games 10 days ago. The Czech Republic prepared against Germany U20 and earned some heavy losses but played without their major prospects.The Latvian U20 team crashed their own U19 team in a friendly game a few days ago and was lead by Janis Antrops and Armands Osins.

You can follow the tournament on the official website and find some eventual Live Streams there as well.

For the Douai World Tournament, the organizers have brought to Northern France the U18 National Teams of Croatia, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Bulgaria and France. The hosts have played two friendly games to prepare the tournament against Germany and finished with 1 loss and 1 win. Both teams seem to be on a similar level. While the German team is driven by the athletic PG Dennis Schröder, they also have interesting assets in the paint with players like Bogdan Radosavljevic or Paul Albrecht. The French team is based around the INSEP core with guys like Hugo Invernizzi or William Howard. The Greek team will be lead by the highly talented inside option Kyprianos Maragkos who comes back from his trip to the US for visiting High Schools. Another player to follow is Eleftheros Bochoridis, a 1994 SG from Aris who already saw some minutes on the professional team.

The Turkish team should be among the strongest with some interesting players like Berkay Candan, Erbil Eroglu or Ugur Dokuyan as well as the enormous Ramazan Tekin. Croatia has concentrated their best talent for the U19 World Championship team so that it is not very clear who will be in Douai with the U18 roster. The Bulgarian team exchanged victories with their U20 counterparts and it were Nikolay Stoyanov, Tencho Tenev and Aleks Simeonov who were the best players for the team.

You can follow the tournament on the official website.

Other interesting tournaments that will be played are from the 23rd to the the 26th June in Cisternino (Italy) with the U18 National Teams of Sweden, Poland, Czech Republic and Italy and from 24th to 26th June in Oberwart (Austria). The second event will feature the U20 National Teams from Austria, Slovenia, Poland and Germany.