European Prospects

The Türk Telekom Tournament, one of the major U16 events, will start this Saturday in Sakarya. Twelve teams have been invited to participate and we wanted to take a quick look at who might shine in the week of action.

The home team from Turkey can be considered as one of the favorites again this year. They won the Iscar tournament in December where they beat Russia, Spain and Castilla Leon pretty easily. The team was led by Mert Cevik who averaged 16.7ppg over the three games in Spain. He will get some support by the very young Okben Ulubay who played already as a 14 year old with the U16 National Team in the Czech Republic last summer. Other players to watch in the team are Tolga Gecim and Mehmet Alemdaroglu.

Poland comes to Turkey with an interesting team as well as the Eastern European country wants to underline its progress in the youth sector. The team of coach Arkadiusz Miloszewsi has interesting size with the 2m10 tall but very raw Daniel Kolanowski and the more developed Filip Pruefer (2m08) who saw already some minutes on the U16 level last summer. Kamil Zywert should be their main asset in the back court as he is ranked #1 prospect by polishhoops.pl in his generation.

Germany will be lead by their all-around forward Jan-Niklas Wimberg who was already one of the most interesting players last summer in the Czech Republic. Wimberg is averaging big numbers in the JBBL League with 28.0ppg, 18.9rpg, 5.7apg, 2.9bpg and an incredible 41.0effpg. He will get some support by the improving Lennart Okeke who is an explosive scoring guard and the versatile Andreas Obst. The German team reached the second spot in Geneva in December and might be able to have a good result in Turkey as well.

France comes to Turkey with a Centre Federal loaded team as 10 of the 12 players are currently playing for the INSEP team. The only player for the French team that was already active on the U16 level is the 2m01 tall inside guy Elie Fedensieu. One of the main guys in the back court could be the shooting guard Erwan Ruiz.

Latvia won the Baltic Sea Basketball Cup a few weeks ago in Tallinn behind the efforts of Gustavs Treimanis and Rudolfs Stradnieks. Treimanis who won the MVP trophy for his team in Estonia has already played minutes on the senior level in Latvia for his team of BS Riga. Stradnieks is even a regular contributor in the 2nd Latvian senior league as the 2m02 tall forward gets nearly 15 minutes per game for Barons.

For Serbia, one of the main attraction should be “el Serbio” Stefan Peno. The 1997 born guard should play for FC Barcelona after he moved to Spain from Serbia last summer but is still listed officially as an OKK Belgrade player because of some transfer issues. Additionally, Serbia will most likely assemble a good mixture of shooters and big men (Jovan Grujic 2m06, Basil Vucetic 2m06, Nikola Pavlovic 2m04) and can be considered as one of the favorites for the Gold Medal.

The Slovenian team of coach Milos Sporar will have the support of the highly talented wing Tilen Kodrin but does not have on its roster Matej Kavas who was playing regular minutes on the Division B Gold Medal U16 team from last summer. Jan Zatkovic is another guy to follow as the 2m06 tall inside player is a good rebounder and might even grow a bit more in the next years.

The teams from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Russia and Egypt are more or less unknowns for me so I can not really give much information about them. You can follow the tournament on the official website and eventually through LIVE Streams. We will keep you posted on our Twitter account if we get any info on LIVE Streams available of the Turkish games at least.