European Prospects

News about Young European Basketball Prospects

Nike Hoops Summit: a look at the Euro bigs

April 15th, 2008 · No Comments

While not having seen the game (if anyone wants to send me a copy would be nice 🙂 ), I had to take a look at what the other websites are saying about the Europeans present in Portland. I found a nice article from SI.com taking a look particularly at Serge Ibaka and Alexis Ajinca.

So Ian Thomsen is not known as being a worldwide recognized scout but he quotes some NBA personnel in his article about the Hoops Summit. So here are the main points about Serge Ibaka.

He doesn’t know how to play, but athletically he’s off the charts — there’s no telling how good he can be.

There are a lot of American 18-year-olds like him, which is to say that Ibaka must improve his skills and feel for the game if he hopes to stand out in the NBA someday.

This does not sound very promising to me as he looks like another athletic freak with still poor basketball knowledge and feel for the game. But I don’t want to judge before having seen him play a bit more. And he is only 18.

An impression confirmed by Mike Schmidt from Draftexpress.

Ibaka appears to be a physical freak with some very nice tools to work with, but he appears to be years away from making an impact at the NBA level.

I hope to get a copy of the game soon, so that I can give you my opinion on him also.

The other big guy that got a lot of attention is of course the already highly discussed Alexis Ajinca. According to the scouts quoted by Ian Thomsen,

Ajinca showed skills with the left hand, the three-point shot — he showed more aggressiveness.

He is a very interesting player, very quick, and his hands are better than last year.

Finally there were also some words about German big man Tim Ohlbrecht who had a rather poor showing according to the reports. But one scout seems to have higher hopes on him.

He’s better than he showed, I think the importance of this game got in his head.

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