European Prospects

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.

Finally may think some people, Uros Tripkovic is waking up and hitting the big shots. The Serbian guard is playing his best basketball at the moment and he may be one of the players that would help his team Partizan qualify for the Final Four of the Euroleague which would probably the biggest surprise in the recent Euroleague history. Also in the Adriatic League, Tripkovic is doing great with a career high 28pts in March.

It may get annoying but Nando de Colo is coming up with huge scoring efforts on a weekly basis in the French top league. He averages 21.6ppg over the last five contests and he had a huge showing also at the FIBA Europe All-Star game where he scored 24pts at 6/7 from the arc.

Martynas Gecevicius had some huge games in the beginning of March when he went for back-to-back performances against Tartu Rock and especially Zalgiris Kaunas in the Baltic League. He scored 7 out 12 from three point area combined in these two games to end up with 28 and 19 respectively in these two clashes. Gecevicius is still only a nice rotation player for Rytas but he may become one of the top shooters in next year’s competitions.

We don’t speak a lot about Finnish basketball here, but the performances of Antti Kanervo in the second highest Finnish league recently are just crazy. The 1989 born combo guard came up with one of the most incredible scoring efforts of the last months when he scored 64pts in a league game against VISA Basket. He netted with an incredible precision 14 from 18 attempts; from three point land. Kanervo is actually heavily recruited by the Top Finnish teams and he may end up somewhere in Europe in the next couple of years too.

Finally, speaking about the 1990 born players, I want to come back to the great performances of Nikos Pappas during the Albert Schweitzer Tournament in Mannheim this March. The Greek Guard won the MVP trophy of the tournament and was the key player for the surprising team from the Peloponnesian region.