European Prospects

After a week of holidays, here we go come back for the most exciting phase of European Youth basketball, the summer months with the different European competitions. But before the coverage of the different tournaments, here are some short news from the last days.

• The United States of America won the U19 World Championships in New Zealand after beating Greece in the Finals 88-80. MVP of the tournament was Mario Delas from Croatia  and he was joined by his team mate Toni Prostran and Nikos Pappas from Greece in the All-Tournament Team. I may go for a more detailed report next to my Kazakhstan special about the U19s in the upcoming days.
• One of the most promising players from Germany, I speak of Robin Benzing, signed a 2 year deal with ratiopharm Ulm this week. The former Michigan recruit will join the team of coach Mike Taylor after having displayed all his talent with the different Youth NT and he is currently on the edge of earning an eventual roster spot for the Senior NT squad for Eurobasket 2009.
• To stay in Germany, the Cologne 99ers that wanted to start this year an ambitious “Team Germany” project giving lots of minutes to local talent has gone bankrupt again and will not play in the BBL next year. The team had two promising German youngsters under contract with Philipp Schwethelm and Tibor Pleiss. The second one is a very interesting target for several other Bundesliga or even European teams as he showed some progress this year. Pleiss had serious playing time in the second part of the season, including a 16pts 7rebs game against Nördlingen and finished the season with 5.0ppg and 2.9rpg in just 12 minutes per game.
• The U20 European Championships will start on Thursday and here we go for some final rosters I found through out the net: Serbia, Lithuania, Germany, Spain or Italy. Some final preparation games have also been played this weekend. A short report in French about the first of two tests between France and Germany can be found here including the scorers of both teams.
• During the preparation for the upcoming U18 European Championships, a big surprise came from Spain where the local Juniors got beat by Germany. The team of 1992 born Philipp Neumann dominated the game at will and won it 66-52. Thanks to Basket en Red, you can watch the highlights of this game right here.