BallinEurope, the European Basketball news site

Congratulations from BallinEurope go out to KK Zagreb Croatia Osiguranje, who are the 2011 Nike International Junior Tournament champions after defeating Žalgiris Kaunas, 76-65, in the championship match this morning. A few observations on the match, if you will…

• First and foremost, there’s Dario Saric. You don’t need BiE to tell you to believe the hype on this dude billed as the next Toni Kukoc after he notched a triple-double of 15/12/10 in this game, but whoa was Saric head and shoulders above the field today.

Saric displayed an incredible all-around game featuring rebounding, leading the fast break, beating his man off the dribble and gorgeous no-look passes – and all this came on the first two Zagreb possessions. Even when his shooting touch was off early (he went for just 3-of-12 shooting in the first half), Saric still established himself as a serious presence in the middle that forced the ball into Žalgiris’ undersized guards’ hands. And the Lithuanian side managed just a woeful 2-of-18 outside the paint in the first half as a result.

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Stojko Vranković is no stranger to championship-level basketball: In 1996, he and Dominique Wilkins led Panathinaikos to its first-ever Euroleague title, played in two EL Final Fours with Aris Thessaloniki, and won Olympic silver medals with Team Yugoslavia and Team Croatia. The former Boston Celtic gave an interview to Sport.gr on the eve of the 2011 Euroleague Final Four in which he reminisces about past glories and makes his own fearless prediction for this year’s tournament (go ahead, guess who he’s got to win it all); an abridged and translated version runs below.

Who do you think will win this year’s cup?
Surely this is a very strong Final Four, but I think that Panathinaikos is the top team. I hope they win [the Euroleague title] for the sixth time and continue the good tradition.

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The tweet from Draft Express rang out at 4.30am CET and posed quite the complex question. To wit: “What does Curtis Stinson – a guy no team in the NBA or Europe has any interest in – winning MVP of the D-League, say about the D-League?”

Such consternation clearly comes from one with an encyclopedic memory, because even for hoops diehards outside of Iowa, the man’s name will mostly elicit an answer of “huh?”

After writing his name throughout the Iowa State Cyclones record book, Stinson went undrafted in 2006 and could not stick with the Golden State Warriors after playing summer league ball with them. And so Stinson took a route familiar to many such players post-NCAA: He sought a job in Europe.

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Talk about your February Madness. In the Krešimir Ćosić Cup, a.k.a. the Croatian Cup, semifinals last night, unheralded KK Zadar (10-19 overall in 2010-11) stunned Eurocup Top 16 team Cedevita Zagreb (16-13), 83-82, on the favorites’ home court.

What’s that you say? Not so crazy? Upsets happen all the time? Okay, consider that KK Zadar fielded five players *for the entire 40 minutes.* That’s right, no substitutions were made.

Starting to get bizarre? Okay, now factor in that, of those five Zadar players, four were younger than 23 years old.

The icing on the straitjacket? Cedevita head coach Aleksandar Petrovic apparently reacted in the only way he saw fit, i.e. to resign his position in embarrassment, effective immediately.

But please, enjoy a little of the madness for yourself below the break, with Marko Car, Paul Marčinković, Sime Olivari, Mario Dundovic and an unlikely hero in buzzer-beating 19-year-old Ivan Batur. Happy February, Europe!

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On this day of 1992 Team USA’s well-deserved induction into the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame, BallinEurope again takes the opportunity to remember those other two squads competing in the Barcelona Games whose impact on an international level was almost as great and whose impact at home was inestimable.

What the Dream Team gave to the international game, aside from the showcasing of quite simply the best side ever assembled by a long shot,* was a new measuring stick for talent, a definition of what national basketball pictures should aspire to produce. In Croatia and Lithuania, however, the national teams in some senses had already won before the Olympic torch was lit.

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It’s a bit of a dunkathon today at BallinEurope as we enter the top 15 of BiE’s official 35 Greatest Basketball YouTubes of All-Time, which were determined by these guidelines. (Usage of “guidelines” in previous sentence is very loose, indeed.)

There’re thrills, chills and a few ills in today’s selection of eminently watchable and rewatchable YouTube videos. Enjoy!

15. Top 10 Dunks over Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje, 2008-09. While Boumtje-Boumtje was a big fan favorite playing for EWE Baskets Oldenburg, his devotees still realized his shortcomings. This fan (really) vid is pretty amazing as a result. You know, it’s hard to believe that “Schadenfreude” is a German word…

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How do you say, “Let’s clean house!” in Croatian? Because that’s the phrase Team Croatia coach Josip Vrankovic was certainly employing when he assembled his 17-man preliminary FIBA World Championship.

After the disappointing finish by the Croats in the 2009 Eurobasket competition, then-head coach Jasmin Repesa hastily resigned and thereafter replaced by Vrankovic; now Vrankovic is ejecting Repesa’s team members, it seems.

Out are Sandro Nicevic, Nikola Vujcic, Marcio Stojic and Nikola Prkacin; Marin Rozic has retired from basketball altogether and Mario Kasun has retired from international play. In is the sensational Ante Tomic, to be training alongside the likes of Marko Tomas, Davor Kus, Zoran Planinic and Stanko Barac.

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Congratulations to Turkey’s Deniz Kiliçli and his West Virginia University Mountaineers, who pulled off the nice 73-66 upset of Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament regional finals last night. With six teams remaining in The Big Dance, Kiliçli is one of two remaining European youngsters in an otherwise all-American tournament; Baylor, with Bosnia & Herzegovina-born Dragan Sekelja, hope to upend no. 1 seed Duke in the Bears’ hometown of Houston.

Kiliçli saw minimal court time in the win, as WVU employed an exceedingly short rotation that had four starters essentially playing throughout and only six players grabbing more than 20 minutes on the floor. The freshman from Turkey had to have been happy just to be there, however.

After entering WVU from Mountain State Academy high school for the 2009-10 season, Kiliçli was immediately greeted with a 20-game suspension for – stop BiE if you’ve heard this before – having played some pro ball in Turkey.

(One has to wonder why, if the NCAA has deemed Kiliçli to have violated the principal precept of American amateur sport, he’s allowed to play college ball at all. Was it because he didn’t make *that much* money in Istanbul?)

Once activated, Kiliçli won the Mountaineer fanbase over quickly in going 4-for-4 for nine points in just seven minutes of playing time in his first-ever game with WVU against Pittsburgh. As the man says, “How about that for a start?”

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God may have created man and Zadar basketball (“Bog je stvorija čovika, a Zadar košarku,” goes the team’s motto), but 81 years of tradition and in fact perhaps the birthplace of organized basketball in Croatia are about to meet with a purely manmade force: Economics.

The financial situation in KK Zadar has reportedly become desperate enough to elicit a public appeal from City Hall to local businessmen to bail out the club.

Mayor Zvonimir Vrančić yesterday publicly announced that KK Zadar was nearly 40 million Croatian kunas (approximately €5.5 million/$7.5 million) in debt, that the city was in no position to cover the shortfall, and that dissolution of all club assets – excepting Krešimir Ćosić, which would remain municipal property – was quite a real possibility.

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Reports last week that the Basketball Hall of Fame would be moving up the 2010 induction ceremony, so as to avoid conflict with the FIBA World Championship tournament and thus focus the hoops universe’s full attention on the 1992 USA Olympic team enshrinement, got me to reminiscing about that seminal game in basketball history: The gold-medal match between the Dream Team and Team Croatia at the Barcelona Olympiad.

While few observers at that time thought the game would even be close after The Greatest Team Ever Assembled (still) had demolished the competition in Barcelona, everyone was well aware that regardless of the final game’s result, the match would literally be one for the books, internationally.

And history has borne out that feeling, ultimately culminating in the unstoppable twelve entering the hallowed halls of Springfield later this year. The Dream Team’s influence was profound and immediate with the jump of basketball to near-preeminence among the world’s most beloved sports, the final burgeoning of the NBA to global sports juggernaut status, and a new emphasis among national sports committees worldwide on basketball. Some credit Spain’s masterful dominance of The Continent today on the Barcelona Games, as though the shine and glamour of Team USA had permeated the country to produce Gasols and Navarros and Rubios.

Twenty years later – and who’d’ve imagined this back then? – that game remains at your fingertips, available for viewing on YouTube in eight parts – Awesome.

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