MVP! MVP!
Okay, folks, for those of you who missed the excellent show put on by FC Barcelona in distancing itself from the second-best team in Europe in 2009-10, Olympiacos, here’s the official highlight clip from last night’s Euroleague championship. (A clip of the best moments from the CSKA Moscow-Partizan Belgrade consolation game also included.)
Enjoy all the shock and awe brought by one of The Continent’s finest teams of the past 20 years.
What does it mean to win a championship? BallinEurope will let Pete Mickael explain it, as he did so eloquently. When asked “How does it feel?” the defensive master stated simply:
“I feel complete. For the first time in my life, I feel complete.”
And that, my friends, will be the capper on BallinEurope’s 2009-10 Euroleague season. Au revoir for now from Paris, France.
It’s official: FC Barcelona is the no. 1 team in Euroleague 2009-10. Powered by Final Four MVP Juan Carlos Navarro’s 21 points and playing ranking of 23 plus some swell defense again from Pete Mickael (who got BallinEurope’s vote for Final Four MVP), Barcelona controlled the game throughout and Olympiacos was unable to ever close the gap to fewer than five points after the first quarter.
Congratulations go out to the Blaugrana for an excellent Euroleague season and here’s to wishing one of Europe’s finest teams of the past two decades continued success in Spain.
Follow the Euroleague’s final games of 2009-10 here at BallinEurope.com tonight (or today, for those of you in the ‘States; tomorrow for Australians i suppose). Click on the “Continue Reading…” link below to open up the chat box.
We’ll start taking comments at about 5.30pm CET (11.30am EST). The consolation game between Partizan Belgrade and CSKA Moscow tips off at 6pm CET (noon EST), with the FC Barcelona-Olympiacos game at 9pm CET (3pm EST). Hope to see you here!
Breathe a sigh of relief Olympiacos fans: Word just came down to press row that Euroleague MVP Milos Teodosic will be playing tonight, but no word on well he’s been feeling today after battling a stomach virus.
(Darn. We might not be seeing so much of Scoonie Penn after all…)
From the Le Sais-Tu Department comes a few interesting news bites on this evening’s Euroleague Championship participants. Read on, triviamongers!
One *big* reason
How thrilled is BallinEurope to see tonight’s Barcelona-Olympiacos final? Let us count the ways…
10. Both teams earned the trip with tough semifinal wins. Against CSKA Moscow, Barcelona played smart while deploying Europe’s best defense in 2009-10 against a much bigger Red Army team; Olympiacos truly gave everything in overcoming plucky Partizan Belgrade. The result: No contentions that referees decided this championship, no regrets of “what might have been” from losing team’s fans.
9. They deserve it. Now this is not to say that teams such as Partizan, CSKA and Maccabi Tel Aviv didn’t have truly outstanding Euroleague seasons in a year when none was supposed to go far at all, but to this point the Blaugrana and the Reds have proven themselves to be the class of European ball this season. And whoever wins this match will have a chance to prove it by opening up a Triple Crown opportunity for 2009-10.
Get well soon, Milos!
With one game left to play in its Euroleague season, Olympiacos has only to face the same old enemy that has dogged their exceptional 2009-10 season. No, BiE’s not talking about Barcelona here or even home-country rivals Panathinaikos, but rather a flu bug.
Olympiacos coach Panagiotis Giannakis stated on Saturday that, “After the game with Partizan, [Milos] Teodosic was suffering from a stomach flu. We hope that he is able to play and help us tomorrow.”
Happy birthday wishes today to Theo Papaloukas!
On winning
“Yesterday, we played beyond our limits. My players gave everything. We need the rest.” – Olympiacos coach Panagiotis Giannakis
“I think I owe Josh [Childress] my life for saving me. I tried to win the game, but I saw the shot was going to the left and I didn’t know what to think, but all of a sudden Josh came from out of nowhere and dunked it. Luck always has something to do with the game and today luck was on our side.” – Theo Papaloukas
Childress was king; no joshing
First up, the CSKA Moscow-FC Barcelona game. Though Pete Mickael’s outstanding defense and the early neutralization of Viktor Khyrapa were really the keys to the game, this clip offers instead a nice mix of plays on both sides of the ball – how would you show a guy drawing fouls on a YouTube video, anyway?
