Monday’s cigarettes

Let’s start the new week with some exciting stories from around the continent.

• Two of the best highflyers of the Spanish ACB met this weekend: Marcus Haislip of Unicaja and Pops Mensah-Bonsu of Joventut Badalona. And both guys had good games, especially Haislip, who finished with a 3-of-5 effort from behind the arc.

• Elie Seckbach, also known as the Embedded NBA Correspondent, came up with a very interesting interview with former TAU and AJ Milano player James Singleton. Even though it was published a month ago, we wanted to mention it, since James tells Elie that people in Europe throw Euro coins at basketball players. James should have told Tyson Chandler so that the Hornet could have avoided this.

• The weekly Brandon Jennings watch: 17 minutes, 1 point (0/4 FGs, 1/2FTs), 1 rebound and 3 assists.

• Fabien Friconnet talks in his blog on basketnews.net about the good old days. When he started to watch Euroleague TV this week, he got a flashback: One of his old VHS tapes featuring a first half of a Champions Cup game between Maes Pils Mechelen and Olympiakos Piraeus. Living in France where basketball on TV is not that common, he is used to always seeing at least one French team play. I’m not quite sure, but I would guess it was this game. And while reading his post, I am also pretty sure that I watched that game on Eurosport at the time as well. Just one question, why is the Belgian team called WATCO on the FIBA Europe stat sheet?

• Nice effort by Ken Johnson of Telekom Baskets Bonn: The center finished the game against the Cologne 99ers with 8 points, 6 rebounds and 8 blocked shots, including five in the first 10 minutes.

• Josh Childress already made it to the first top 10 plays of the Euroleague with a massive rejection. However, the play of the day for me was Mike Hall’s Kobe-esque basket with the foul. By the way, Draftexpress had a longer piece on the American forward.

• Ricky Rubio got a nice cake for his 18th birthday this week.