European Prospects

Last week, I got some information from reader Guillaume Althoffer about the U16 Tournament in Bellegarde. With the participation of the National Teams from Greece, Czech Republic, France and Serbia, the competition level was correct and it was a good possibility to see some future greats.

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• What a game for Christian Standhardinger this weekend with his German ProB team. 35pts, 12rebs and 8 assists for a 51 efficiency rating.
• Nicolas Batum also had one of his better games in a double overtime win for Le Mans. The French forward finished with 19pts and 9 assists.
• Jorn Steinbach, the 1989 born Belgian PG came up with a nice 25pts scoring effort to lead his team to a first victory in the Playoffs that would eventually bring Waregem to Division 1 in Belgium
• With some delay, FMP Zeleznik won the FMP Tournament last weekend in Belgrade in a highly disputed Final against Lietuvos Rytas. FMP forward Bojan Subotic was named MVP for leading his team to a perfect 4-0 record. He was joined on the all-tournament team by fellow FMP big man Dejan Musli, Montepaschi forward Nika Metreveli and the Partizan duo of Nemanja Jaramay and Aleksander Vlahovic. All the results and stats can be found here.
• With these results, we know now already 6 participants for the upcoming NIKE International Junior Tournament to be played at the Euroleague Final Four in Madrid in the beginning of May: Real Madrid (Hosts), Zalgiris Kaunas (Champions 2007), FC Barcelona, FMP Zeleznik, Lietuvos Rytas and Red Star Belgrade. Two wildcards will be distributed within the next weeks.

With a little bit of delay, here are the nominees for the EuropeanProspects.com Prospect of the Month of March 2008. The February award goes to Rudy Mbemba from Sweden by the way.

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After having analyzed in the detail the four best placed European nations of the tournament, I will come back to the other European teams, unfortunately only in a shorter fashion as I saw these teams only once in Mannheim. Also, I will limit myself really to the main players of these teams in order to not go too much in the detail.

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Maybe the positive surprise of the tournament was the 8th place of Sweden. The team from coach Tommie Hansson won the game it had to win against Germany in order to qualify for the Top 8 but then declined slowly in their performance. The team has however some interesting prospects in their roster, especially from the 1991 generation.

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The Spanish team was present but of course without their absolute superstar of the 1990 generation Ricky Rubio. The team from coach Jota Cuspinera presented however a nice combination of talent and was probably one of the deepest teams present in Mannheim. We took a particular at one of the most talented players of the team in particular and give some information about the other players too.

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Turkey came to Mannheim with a baggage full of confidence and a mixture of very talented players. The main man to scout for me was of course 1992 born Enes Kanter who has dominated the U16 Türk Telekom Tournament a few weeks before. But it was not only him that came up with interesting performances.

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The Greek team came to Mannheim without being considered as one of the favorites. The tallest player just being 2m02, it looked like the guys from coach Georgias Vlassopoulos would be punished inside. But it came a whole lot different. Not only that Greece won the tournament, the team featured some very interesting talent, at least for the European level.

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The Albert Schweitzer Tournament is over and it is time to talk about the players and the tournament in general. The first article will be about the level of the tournament and a report about the best non-European players.

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Here are my final picks from the Albert Schweitzer Tournament 2008. There will be a lot more detailed reports published in the next days.

• First of all, here is my report on the final day that I wrote for Ball in Europe
• Nearly 30.000 fans followed the tournament throughout the whole week
• The injury of Maurice Stuckey that prevented the German guard to play the AST was not that important as he already could play again with his team Ehingen this weekend