BallinEurope, the European Basketball news site

Episode #30 of the BallinEurope/heinnews weekly podcast Taking The Charge is now available online and on iTunes.

David Hein and BiE are joined this week by Ben Golliver of SI.com and Blazers Edge; based in Portland, Ben was lucky enough to have attending the 2013 Nike Hoop Summit live and so much time is spent discussing prospects and performance of Livio Jean-Charles, Andrew Wiggins, Dennis Schroder and the rest of the top-quality youth players from that game. (The match in its entirety is still available on YouTube and is embedded directly below.)

Golliver also shares some thoughts on the NBA’s first seasons with “flopping” rules in the books; it seems the man has become something of the expert on the move over there at SI.com, ultimately culminating in the wonderful Floppies awards ranking the 10 most ridiculous dives of the season over there.

Also on our collective mind of course are this week’s Euroleague quarterfinal games five; while Semih Erden and Jamon Lucas were heroic in two Anadolu Efes wins, can the Turkish side continue to neutralize Vassilis Spanoulis’ playmaking ability? And can FC Barcelona produce enough points (like, more than 70) to top the masterful Panathinaikos half-court D?

Finally, our tenuously-related sports movie review of the week focuses on the 1988 cult classic They Live starring professional wrestling all-time great Roddy Piper – one of the great flicks about the Reagan era 80s in America, except with great throwaway lines and comic-book hilarity.

Check out the entire podcast here or to subscribe from this episode ad infinitum, enter http://heinnews.com/feed/taking-the-charge/ into iTunes or any podcast aggregator.

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Before US-based news about that other election going down tomorrow swamps the entire blogosphere, BiE wants to get in news of our own polling results. With voting closed on Sunday, it has been decided by readers that the Minnesota Timberwolves of Andrei Kirilenko, Alexey Shved, Nikola Pekovic and hopefully-someday-soon Ricky Rubio will serve as the official NBA home team of BallinEurope for the 2012-13 season.

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We’ll attempt to try something new here at BallinEurope and, in lieu of an actual franchise in the big league setting up shop on The Continent (confidently expected any century now), adopt a home team for the NBA’s 2012-13 season.

Which team deserves to be called Europe’s team in the NBA? You decide! Vote below the break!

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Storyline #15

We’re doing something slightly different for 2012-13; rather than a team-by-team breakdown of the NBA and its 50-plus Europeans in the rolls, BiE instead presents the 25 storylines this website will attempt to keep tabs on as the 2012-13 edition of the NBA enfolds. Enjoy the season (unless you’re in the Twitter Airlines NBA fantasy league, in which case BiE’ll attempt to seek misplaced vengeance for his general incompetence in the Euroleague game…)!

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Koufos one of four Euronuggets

Taking a look at this year’s roundup, we note that 53 Europeans have been named to NBA clubs’ 15-man roster, just beating the pace of the 52 listed in 2010-11. (BiE didn’t take the tally for last season because, you know, things were kinda confusing during the lockout and all…)

And quite a few teams have seriously European-tinted rosters: Five teams go into the 2012-13 NBA season with four Continental players – and of these 20 players, perhaps only Sasha Pavlovic and Evan Fournier are marginalized at the lower end of the 15-man rosters. If one includes Ty Lawson as an honorary Lithuanian (for at least one more season), the Denver Nuggets could put an all-Euro squad on the floor with Lawson heading up an admittedly odd lineup of Fournier, Danilo Gallinari, Kosta Koufos and Timofey Mozgov.

The team-by-team breakdown goes as follows.

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How did BallinEurope miss this when released in March? We’ll blame it on the collapse of the mainstream recording industry … better late than never, BiE supposes. Click below the link to hear the audacious single “Arvydas Sabonis” by Indiana-based rock collective Margot and the Nuclear So and So’s. Lyrics run below the video for the karaoke effect.

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In celebration of certainly still the most significant year in international basketball history, BallinEurope today begins the “Twenty years ago today” series in which we’ll peer back in time through the lens of YouTube to that era of morphing European national teams and Dream Team dominance.

In the wake of that Greatest Basketball Team Ever Assembled, much of the 1991-92 professional seasons themselves get the short shrift in the history books, but some quite interesting stuff was nevertheless happening on the Continent.

• The Euroleague boasted a cliffhanging thriller in Partizan Belgrade vs. Joventut Badalona. Badalona brought Harold Pressley (with averages of 20.3 points and 8.3 rebounds per EL game) and Rafael Jofresa, while the Black-and-Whites boasted local products Predrag Danilovic and Aleksanda Djordjevic. It was the latter who’d deliver the European championship to the storied franchise for its first and, to date, last such title ever.

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Vincent Collet today released his final roster of Team France for the 2012 Olympic Games. Best news for Les Bleus’ (and perhaps San Antonio Spurs’) faithful is, of course, the inclusion of Tony Parker in the roster, implying that recovery from his eye injury is meeting no setbacks.

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Once again on June 7, BallinEurope takes a look back at one of the all-time greats, without whom the game of basketball would not be the same: Dražen Petrović. The man is still missed.

An entire generation has entered basketball since his untimely passing and while ever-growing numbers of NBA and European stars who have never seen him play emerge, all owe a debt to Dražen Petrović.

It was on this day in 1993 that the only man who realistically could have held claim to the sobriquet of “the European Michael Jordan” was killed in a car accident in Germany. As detailed in the excellent ESPN “30 for 30” documentary “Once Brothers,” Petrović was a fearless, proud player with Team Yugoslavia and later Team Croatia in international play; was on the verge of entering the prime of a Hall of Fame-level career with the New Jersey Nets.

For those of you who never saw Petrović play, do yourselves a favor and take some time to watch below. For those of us fortunate enough to remember this European pioneer blazing trails all over the world, it’s a welcome (if slightly meandering) trip down memory lane. We still miss you, Dražen.

History has been unkind to Petrović vis-à-vis his NBA battles with that 1990s uber-phenomenon, i.e. Michael Jordan. Surely many Nets and Chicago Bulls fans remember the battles between these two powers which were mostly, as they say these days, “epic.”

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While much of the Continent enjoys Easter Monday and North America heads back to work, BallinEurope takes the occasion today to clear out a few items from the backburner. First up, here’s part four of the “On the Road to London” mini-documentary series on Team France’s leadup to the 2012 Olympic Games.

This episode dedicated to “perfectionist” Vincent Collet is simply entitled “Le Coach.” In the vid, Collet emphasizes the importance of “Keeping up the attitude and enthusiasm” Les Bleus both displayed and generated among the populace with its silver-medal finish at Eurobasket 2011.”

Collect also describes the comeback of team and program from “hitting rock bottom” in 2008. At Eurobasket 2007, France failed to qualify for the 2008 Olympics after squeaking through two rounds of group play and suffering a first-round bouncing from the tournament by eventual champions Team Russia. Les Bleus thus had to rebuild for Eurobasket 2009 – only to be immediately hit with another obstacle when Tony Parker went down early in that tourney.

Nevertheless, the rest is history. Success in ’09 with possibly France’s strongest roster ever led to the podium finish in Lithuania last year.

“Le Coach” features a few comments from Boris Diaw, Nicolas Batum (who says “I am where I am today because I’ve had the chance to meet [Collet] during my career,” so thank le coach, Portland Trail Blazers fans) and of course T.P. himself.

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