European Prospects

I have talked already about the interesting game of Alexis Ajinca last week. Now, the French league published the clip with the best plays of that game on their website.

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Another tournament that has been in the eyes of the Euroleague to become a qualifying event for the Nike International Junior Tournament is the traditional Cholet Mondial Basket. We have here the names of the already confirmed teams of the 2008 edition.

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• Ricky Rubio is still amazing (13pts 5rebs 5asts 2stls), even if his team lost this weekend against local rivals Barcelona. However, he had a very special move to score against the whole Barcelona defense.
• Predrag Samardziski came up with a huge statistical effort this week in the Adriatic League. He destroyed Geoplin Slovan with 19pts (8/11), 11rebs and 4 blocks for a total evaluation of 31. A good rebound after some ups and downs over the last weeks for him.
• It is always nice to see how some of the more unknown young prospects are doing. For example Jorn Steinbach who excelled with the Belgian U18 team last summer in the European Championship of the B Division. He is actually getting serious minutes with his team Waregem in the 2nd Belgian league. Not only that the team is actually first of the division, Steinbach is also putting some scoring on the table with 9.4ppg. Other interesting Belgians in the lower divisions are for example Lorenzo Giancaterino (1990) who is averaging 16.4ppg in the third division or Jean-Marc Mwema (1989) who scores 13.2ppg on that level for a moving up candidate.
• A career game for Alexis Ajinca this weekend in the national broadcasted game against Nicolas Batum’s Le Mans. The skinny seven footer from Hyères-Toulon finished the game with 11pts 8rebs and 3blks in just 15 minutes on the court. Without having seen him play so far this season, one thing I want to mention is that he did not take one three-point shot since the first week of the season. Maybe DX selection as “Who’s not” in their excellent weekly recap motivated Alexis to show what he can do on the court 😉
• The Clash in the German ProB between the two best scorers of the 1989 generation between Elias Harris (Speyer) and Christian Standhardinger (Ehingen/Urspring) ended with an overtime victory for the the team of Ehingen. And it was the awaited scoring festival of both standouts. Standhardinger came up with a crazy 26pts at 10/15 shooting assorted with 9rebs, 2asts and 2stls while Harris was not that lucky in his shooting but finished however with 24pts (8/19) and 12rebs. PG Frank Wiseler had also an interesting performance with 13pts and 9asts (one of them to find the open player for the overtime buzzer).
• To continue in Germany, the NBBL U19 league features some huge statistic efforts this weekend with two great performances by two young players. To start with, I want to talk about the Austrian forward Florian Trmal (who was not selected for the All-Star game which was totally not understandable). The powerful and athletic forward totally destroyed the actual vice-champion Phoenix Hagen with 32pts 21rebs 6stls and 3blks to finish with an astonishing 55 evaluation. This was not a once in a lifetime performance for the 1989 born forward as he is actually averaging 21.1ppg and 14.8rpg. Another huge show this weekend came from Trier’s Maik Zirbes who lead his team to an important road victory with 38pts and 19rebs with a 47 evaluation. In a recent interview, Zirbes also informed us that during the tournament series he played with Urpsring in the States over Christmas, he got a scholarship offer from the University of Miami (ACC). However, he will stay in Trier at least until 2009 to finish his school. Since the professional team changed their head coach, Zirbes is also practicing 3-4 times a week under Coach Yves Defraigne who is particularly working hard with the Centers and the youngsters.

The teams that will participate in this year’s edition of the Victor Rho Tournament have been announced. The traditional tournament in Northern Italy will be played this year from 26th April to 1st May.

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Today, we will talk about a young guy from Finland, Mikko Koivisto. He is one of the many Finnish NCAA players and I wanted to know a bit more about him.

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The Euroleague announced that the City of Belgrade Junior Tournament is the second U18 club tournament that has been elected to be part of the qualifying tour for the Final Four Nike International Junior Tournament.

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Last weekend was the NBBL All-Star game during the German All-Star Day. Here is a recap of the main prospects of that game.

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• An interesting update in Spanish about Giorgi Shermadini including some interesting videos of the Georgian seven footer.
• NBA Draft.net has translated an article about another European giant: Boban Marjanovic
• The Douai Tournament organisation confirmed the following participants for this year’s edition: France, USA, Croatia, Turkey, Israel, Germany and Lithuania. There is one spot to be filled and the potential candidates are Australia, Adidas Nations Africa Team, Belgium, Spain or Serbia.
• Tibor Pleiss, Marko Keselj and Philip Schwethelm are free agents probably after their team Köln 99ers went bankrupt today. At least for Keselj, who is still owned by the Spanish team Girona who have loaned him to Cologne this year, it will be probably a new destination in the upcoming days. For the two German prospects, as the youth section of the team is not concerned, they will probably play for the NBBL team if they don’t get recruited by another team in the next days.

End of March is coming which means that the Albert Schweitzer Tournament is approaching. Today, the German basketball federation published some important details about the group stage as well as ticket information.

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Beside going to Mannheim today, I got some interesting news ahead of the German All-Star Day. In fact, FIBA is planning to organize a U17 World Championship in 2010 and Germany is one of the candidates for organizing it. I talked already several times about the changes that will come up in the German basketball scene due to a federation that finally recognized that there has to be some changes to remain competitive after the Olympics this year when the whole generation around Dirk Nowitzki will retire from the National team. Besides the creation of the U19 league NBBL, they will start now with a tournament series for U14 kids and try to get this U17 WC in their country.

Another important thing is the move of the U20 European Championships this summer from Ventspils to Riga. The tournament, where I will normally be present will be played from 1st to 10th August.

I am about to leave to Mannheim to follow the NBBL All-Star Game during the German All-Star Day. I will come up with a Live Blog out of the SAP Arena later today. I will cover the whole day also for ballineurope.com. Feel free to join me and every comment and questions are welcome. See you later.