BallinEurope, the European Basketball news site

Hard to believe it’s almost over … after 19 days of intense basketball competition, the 2011 EuroBasket championship game features a matchup at least a few — including BallinEurope’s U.K. guy Sam Chadwick; props! — had forecast as the outcome. Spain seeks to defend its title against a star-laden France playing in its first-ever title match. (Though France has bagged one silver medal in this tournament, this came in the very strange 1949 edition of the tournament, in which no knockout stage was held.)

BallinEurope runs some notes and posts some clips in preparation for tonight’s match; for Official Fearless Predictions™ on this one and the bronze-medal game between FYR Macedonia and Russia, scroll all the way to the bottom.

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With just two days (and one game per team) remaining in 2011 EuroBasket round two, BallinEurope takes a brief look at some issues and trends going down in the tournament – plus links and YouTubes, of course. Read on for quips, quotes and clips.

• Importance of remaining games. Of six games left to play, four are critical to shaping the knockout round while two feature battles of undefeated teams fighting for group supremacy and the no. 1 seed. Both Spain-France tonight and FYR Macedonia-Russia tomorrow determine the group’s top two finishers, while the Slovenia-Finland (definitely) and Turkey-Serbia (most likely) games will lock in the no. 4 teams from the groups.

• Valanciunas vs. Kanter. In terms of prospect-watching, these are the guys observers have their eyes on. In general, Toronto Raptors fans should be fairly stoked – even a tad miffed that the Lithuanian lad won’t be joining their club for the 2011-12 season (should it happen) – about Valanciunas’ progress.

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Happy 100th, Tony Parker! As in the 100th appearance he’ll be making for the French national team tonight in a friendly between Les Bleus and Team Spain in Almeria. Parker has been synonymous with both Team France and the FIBA Eurobasket tournament itself; barring injury, the San Antonio Spur’s appearance in Lithuania for this year’s competition would make it six consecutive Eurobaskets in a streak going back to the beginning of last decade.

Parker first suited up for France in 1997, aging his way through U16, U18 and U20 international tournaments to 2002. Tops among his international tournament performances was at the 2000 FIBA U18 European Championship: As France took the Continental title, Parker was named MVP for his 25.8 points, 6.8 assists and a completely insane 6.8 steals per game – a performance which was certainly incentive enough for San Antonio to draft him into the NBA in round one in 2001.

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[Editor's note: BallinEurope apologizes for a previous edition of this piece which incorrectly identified Jan Vesely as having rights owned by the Oklahoma City Thunder. This was a grievous error of which you surely need not know details. Rest assured that the infinite number of monkeys formerly ravaging the BiE headquarters are now under control of the proper authorities. Thank you for your patience.]

Jan Vesely was yesterday named FIBA Europe’s Young Men’s Player of the Year for 2010, nipping three-time winner (!) Ricky Rubio for the honors. Both fans and a panel of experts voted, with the tallies weighted to produce a final score.

How close was the race between Vesely and Rubio? Vesely received some 53 more popular votes than The Human YouTube Clip of 97,079, a difference of less than 0.06%; in the expert vote, Vesely scored 14 points higher than Rubio of a total 693, or just about a 2% margin.

Finishing third overall was 19 year-old Jonas Valanciunas, currently of Lietuvos Rytas; Andrew Albicy, currently of Paris-Levallois; and “Free” Enes Kanter, currently in basketball limbo thanks to forces beyond his control.

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How good is Bogdanovic? Discuss.

Seven Euroleague games go off tonight as the season rounds into form a bit. The marquee match tonight has got to be the Khimki-Baskonia showdown to establish early supremacy in that tough Group A; Olympiacos-Unicaja will surely be worth the viewing as well, although the way the Reds have dominated on their home floor lately will make things difficult for the Spanish side.

In preparation for the festivities, then, BallinEurope presents some talking points: facts, stats, oddities, history and video relating to the games. Enjoy!

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Oh boy, does Britain need Ben in 2011

Despite the fact that Team Britain has managed to qualify for 2010 Eurobasket tournaments on both men’s and women’s sides, FIBA secretary-general/International Olympic Committee member Patrick Baumann has placed yet another condition to be met in exchange for bids at the 2012 Olympic Games.

According to today’s Scotsman newspaper via a letter sent from Baumann to Basketball Scotland vice-chairman Bill McInnes, Baumann now demands as prerequisite to Olympic entry “that a single governing body in Britain is established for basketball” uniting programs from England, Scotland and Wales.

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Last Tuesday in the 2010 FIBA World Championship, Team Lithuania completed a huge comeback to defeat the heavily-favored Spain 76-73 – just another win on the way to the tournament round, albeit an exceedingly exciting one, right? Wrong.

BallinEurope’s man in Lithuania, known in this space since last year’s LKL championship series insanity as Y., states that the Spain game meant a heck of a lot more for his country, the basketball-maddest in Europe if not the world. For Y. and his countrymen going into an elimination game with Argentina tonight, this edition of Team Lithuania is already heroic.

“Basketball is just a game, after all” – I remember reading this in Lithuanian media once. And I’m always thinking about it, about how that phrase really fits in our country.

In places other than Kaunas games are played in half-empty arenas, LKL mid-level games get astonishing lows in TV ratings, and our top players such as Šarūnas Jasikevičius more often opted out to rest in the summer rather than play for our National Team while, in comparison, other top teams like Spain always enjoy most of their roster intact.

“True,” I thought once, “we are not as mad about basketball as we would like to be.”

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Perovic: No Gasol, no easy win for Spain

When Serbia and Spain meet tonight to determine which of the European powers will advance to the 2010 FIBA World Championship final four, it will mark the third time the squads meet in one year – in fact, it’s been 366 days since the relatively unheralded young Serbs surprised the sluggish Spaniards in their Eurobasket 2009 opening game.

And the two Eurobasket 2009 games in which the teams faced off is hardly history: 17 of the 24 players on the teams’ rosters have returned for this tournament. It is, however, one of Team Spain’s two absentees that will make the difference in the rubber match tonight, in Kosta Perovic’s opinion: Pau Gasol.

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The Prize

Now that noted astrophysicist Stephen Hawking has announced God’s non-existence in our universe through mathematics, maybe he can start working on explaining the FIBA tie-breaking procedure.

No, no, don’t start on BiE; it’s as easy as dialing up Wikipedia to find the steps in determining seeding for tournament play: Placement is determined based on, in order, game results between tied teams; scoring average between games of the tied teams; scoring average for all games of tied teams; drawing of lots.

Nice and neat it may be, but empirically this definition falls short. Seriously somebody should explain to BiE how/why France ends up in the fourth seed in Group D (and with the unfortunate fate of drawing home Turkey in round one) when they clearly whupped Spain’s butts early? How/why does Team China, a team that’s seemingly won one game in all of 2010, advance over Puerto Rico who not only beat China in the preliminaries but also outscored and surrendered fewer points than either of the other two squads involved in the tiebreaker?

Ah, whatever. Here’s the way BallinEurope might have seeded the tournament, based firstly on record and thereafter on momentum – after five games, at least we’ve got that objective criteria.

1. USA, 5-0. Is there any doubt that Kevin Durant will, at some point in his career, be called The Best Player in the World? That outrageous amounts of big guys aren’t necessarily life-or-death in an international tournament? That Kevin Love, thanks to his hard work and exposure, will be the most popular Minnesota Timberwolf next season? That we should finally stop calling these guys “The B-deem Team”? Answers: No, maybe a little yet, absolutely not, and yes please.

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Rosie knows it

“Sometimes when you win, you really lose. And sometimes when you lose, you really win. And sometimes when you win or lose, you actually tie and sometimes when you tie, you actually win or lose. Winning or losing is all one organic globule, from which one extracts what one needs.” – Gloria Clemente, White Men Can’t Jump

Congratulations go out from BallinEurope to Teams USA, Turkey and Lithuania for getting tickets punched into the knockout tournament as VIP no. 1 seeds. And while the Argentina-Serbia battle tonight to determine how Group A shakes out should be a dandy, the one to watch – particularly if you’re a FIBA official or conspiracy theorist – will be Russia vs. Greece.

In what is definitely a case of “he who wins shall lose,” the no. 2 seed in Group C will face what appears to be the most difficult path to the championship game in the bracket. Assuming Team Spain handles winless Canada, the winner of tonight’s Russia-Greece contest would first draw Espana as no. 3 seed in Group D in the “eight finals,” followed by (Team USA) the winner of USA vs. Angola/Australia.

The loser of Russia-Greece would get a bracket that includes an opening game against France followed by the winner of Argentina vs. Brazil/Croatia – while hardly an easy road, which do you think David Blatt and Jonas Kazlauskas would prefer?

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