Fantasy Basketball: Get ready for SuperManager

This weekend the Spanish ACB starts, and so it’s time to get your ACB.com SuperManager team ready. I will also be present this year in the most popular fantasy basketball game in Europe but, as I am not that much into the ACB, my team won’t be super. Possessing a lot of knowledge about a country does not necessarily help you, though, as I can see in my current ranking in German fantasy. But more on that later.

To create your Super Manager teams, you should go to the official website of the game. When setting up your roster, you have to pay attention to the specific rules of the ACB: minimum of four Spanish flagged players (Players that can play as Spanish citizens; guys like Tiago Splitter are included because of their double-citizenship) and maximum of two non-European players. All the players are easy to recognize as you find a flag next to every name in the database.

Due to specificity of the ACB, this year featuring only 17 teams, you’ll have to pay attention that one team is not playing on every game day. The players from that team can be exchanged for “free” after every gameday in addition to the three allotted substitutions. For Day 1, Gran Canaria is not playing.

ACB.com also offers lots of interesting prices again this season. The final winner goes away with a €6000 holiday trip and several other prizes can be won. Next to the normal race for the best team, there is a also a Broker Challenge, in which the team with the most monetary value at the end wins. Here, too, a holiday trip can be won. So you see that it’s really worth participating. To make it even more fun, we also created the BallinEurope Private League. The password is the same as always: ballineurope. Hope to see you there.

This weekend will also see the start of the French Fantasy League, so you still have some time to create your ProA team and join us on basketnews.net. At the moment, we have already four very competitive teams of BallinEurope readers in the race, at least four teams that have the heart to unveil their name. Good luck to Eric and his Alsace Teckels, Dimitris’ wardjdim team, Uhg80’s Scouted by Don Beck and of course my own team.

In the German fantasy league, I must admit that I again made all my typical mistakes and did not follow the official BallinEurope 10 commandments of a good fantasy team. Not only that, I took guys that have been injured since the beginning (George Evans) and prospects that are total fantasy busts despite playing minutes (Bahiense de Mello, Lischka, Hoffmann); now, I also read that my best contributor  thus far (Julius Jenkins) is injured and will miss at least the next game while Giessen could eventually disappear because of financial problems, taking another of my players (Lischka) with them. Thank you very much. I think I have to do this now:

Fantasy Basketball: France is ready, too

After we presented a German Bundesliga Fantasy League and created the BallinEurope.com division three weeks ago, today French website basketnews.net launched its own French ProA and ProB Fantasy League. Here is the way if you want to participate even if there is no possibility to create a private division.

First of all, you have to go to the specific website of the fantasy league, which you can find here. You create your account by clicking on “créer un compte” in the red box on the right side. Then you create your account by entering the normal characteristics and you can chose the English language, which is a great feature that neither the German nor the Spanish SuperManager (which we will also introduce to you in the next few days) offer.

So I created my own “BallinEurope.com” team today and if other readers want to compete with me, just publish your team name in the comments here so that I can make a follow up. And we will have our own private division here on BallinEurope.com. Good luck…

In our German division, though, the first day has not been as successful for my “Local Heroes” team as I have wished. With the injury of my center hope George Evans and the bad game by Derrick Allen, all my hopes for an early lead have been washed away. So the first congratulations go to uhg80, who managed to take the lead of the race with his “einbeinigen Blinden” team. So for those who are interested, here is the roster I used to start the season.

Guards

C. Hoffmann (Trier)
D. Bahiense de Mello (Frankfurt)
P. Günther (Ulm)
J. Jenkins (Berlin)
D. Raivio (Trier)

Forwards

J. Lischka (Gießen)
D. Allen (Frankfurt)
B. Bailey (Düsseldorf)
J. Gibbs (Ulm)

Center

T. Ohlbrecht (Bamberg)
G. Evans (Trier)
T. Pleiß (Köln)

Monday’s cigarettes

There we go: We know now all the Eurobasket 2009 participants except one, and the Euroleague tipoff is only one month away.

• So France and Italy have to go through an additional qualifying round next summer in order to qualify for Eurobasket 2009. In the tournament, they will face Bosnia-Herzegovina, Portugal, Finland and Belgium. Czech Republic, Hungary, Ukraine and Estonia will play for the relegation in Division B.
• Talking of Division B, there are still three teams that remain unbeaten and have the best chances to move up to Division A: Belarus, Montenegro and Sweden. The competition will resume in summer 2009.
• The first major European League, the German Bundesliga, started this weekend. You can still join our Fantasy League Division and if you want to get the real feeling, watch the impressive pre-season trailer from Telekom Baskets Bonn. By the way, the league will start with three new arenas and is about to reach 2nd place in our European attendance ranking.
• ACB Classico brings us the phenomenal Sarunas Jasikevicius during the 2003 Finals with FC Barcelona, where he comes up with a monumental blocked shot to decide the game.
• The French basketball press saw some changes recently, with the end of Maxi-Basket and Basketnews and their merger into two new magazines: BasketNews weekly and MaxiBasketnews monthly. Additionally, BasketNews now also has a very informative website, though only in French.
• A shocker in the Italian League, as two teams have been excluded: Capo d’Orlando and Napoli. The Sicilian team was late in their payments while Napoli faked documents in an attempt to enter the league. Both teams will not be replaced.
• The Lliga Catalana has once again been won by DKV Joventut Badalona in beating Regal FC Barcelona 95-83 behind 29 points from Demond Mallet.