The "beautiful, enigmatic bastard"
Lazy Sunday? Great: BallinEurope has just the thing to occupy your time! Below run some quality articles and gawk-worthy YouTubes from the week that was in European basketball and NBA lockout land for your perusal. The bullet-point format is in effect and the show stars Danny Green, Ruben Boumtje-Boumtje, Walter Szczerbiak, Spike Lee and Samuel L. Jackson. Enjoy!
• For an excellent and thorough piece on the Real Madrid offense (and concomitant weak interior defense) in light of Thursday night’s Euroleague loss to Maccabi Tel Aviv, check out this work at In The Game. Figures writer Rod Higgins in part: “…it is doubtful that [Real’s] current style will serve them particularly well once the regular season is over. Madrid get most of their wins by simply outscoring their opponents. This means that they have to improve defensively; Bilbao, Milano and Maccabi have repeatedly exposed the weak interior defense of the Merengues earlier in the season…”
• Hey, some positivity for the Lithuanian fans! Roll the top 10 plays by Lietuvos Rytas in October!
BallinEurope apologizes for the recent two-day drought of content in an attempt to catch up on “the day job” since returning from the Euroleague Final Four tournament. To (hopefully) make up for this dearth a bit, and in honor of Panathinaikos’ stirring win in the big league, BiE today presents an updated version of its List of 2010-11 European Champions.
While much of the basketball-loving world was distracted by the squall of opening-round NBA playoff games, the roundball game nevertheless played on in leagues throughout Europe and beyond. Of course, this lead-in mainly serves as an excuse to justify running the below handful of highlights, links and pithy bon mots to (help you waste some time on Monday morning) get your week started correctly (and by “correctly,” BiE means in part ignoring that 109-100 win by the New Orleans Hornets).
The list of teams that will make up the 2010-11 Eurocup regular seasons is all but complete – 93.75% complete, to be exact, with 30 of the 32 teams now set. The finish of the Eurocup Qualifying Round promoted eight more clubs into the regular season, leaving two more spots open, which will be determined by the final Euroleague qualifiers. BC Khimki holds a huge lead over Le Mans for the first spot, while Alba Berlin looks to dig its way out of a four-point deficit in hosting Spirou Basket on Sunday.
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 
During the 2009-10 Euroleague season, one of the most watched statistics was totally off-court; with financial stress pervasive throughout The Continent, most European basketball franchises prepared for the worst and tightened belts in expectation of lower turnouts.
To little fanfare, the list of players invited to the training camp list for Team Germany was released in advance of the 2010 FIBA World Championship, as the German Basketball Federation (DBB) today posted 16 names invited by Dirk Bauermann. See if you can figure out if anyone’s missing.
