BallinEurope, the European Basketball news site

So how did Vlade Divac spend his All-Star weekend? By hanging out with former Bull/Cavalier/Raptor/Gran Canaria/Tau Ceramica big man Kornél Dávid plus a buncha players from Hungary and old Yugoslavia!

As a prelude to the Hungarian National League all-star game between locals and foreign-born players, the country’s sole NBA product was reunited with his fellow members of the 1999 Team Hungary, which still represents the country’s last Eurobasket Final 16 appearance since 1969. Of the 10 to suit up for the Hungarian team against the former Laker/Hornet/King, five are still active in professional ball.

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Retrospective time comes again to BallinEurope! But hey, who doesn’t like an excuse to watch a bunch of air-raising slam dunks? Following are 20 of the best dunks pulled off in Europe, by Europeans or on Europeans; whether historically significant or not, all have one thing in common: That awesomeness inherent only in a proper jam. Enjoy a year’s worth of emphatic twos from BiE!

• How great is everything going for Maccabi Tel Aviv this season? They even produced one of the greatest jams of the calendar year with Jeremy Pargo’s bitchin’ double-posterization in which first he breaks ankles before jamming it over (through, really) the hapless Zalgiris Kaunas big man.

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Over at Real GM, they’re taking a bit of a detour from their NBA focus to present an interview with J.R. Giddens, guard with Asseco Prokom Gdynia and formerly of BiE alma mater University of New Mexico.

After an infamous bar fight in which he was stabbed, Giddens transferred from the University of Kansas to New Mexico, where he was the undisputed team stud in 2006-07 and 2007-08, playing over 30 and 32 minutes per game in the two seasons. Giddens was taken as the last pick of the first round in the 2008 NBA Draft, but couldn’t stick with the Boston Celtics. After spending time with the D-League Utah Flash, a cup of coffee with the New York Knicks in 2010 and finally with the Sacramento Kings’ summer league squad, Giddens’ (and Bobby Brown’s) agent had his client take a deal to play with Poland’s Euroleague club.

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After seeing the new starting lineup for the Phoenix Suns against the Denver Nuggets on Sunday – featuring Hakim Warrick on the floor for the opening tipoff and Hedo Turkoglu back to his familiar role coming in off the bench, BallinEurope got to thinking about the well-traveled Turk and his effect on various teams as he bounces about seeming from contender to contender. (Hey, that’s how it is being BiE.)

Despite the fact that he’d racked up nearly five straight seasons’ worth of starting for the Orlando Magic and last year’s Toronto Euroraptors, Turkoglu only really got the nod in the Suns’ starting five due the huge wake of Amare Stoudamire’s departure.

Hindsight is 20/20, though, and BiE at 2010-11 tipoff time was somewhat stoked to see Turkoglu’s addition to the go-go Suns in a near-exhumation of the eight-second offenses of Mike D’Antoni. Slightly warping the “Cancer Effect” statistic as detailed in the FreeDarko guys’ Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac shows Turkoglu to have a CE rating of minus-32 spread over five different teams. In nearly every new spot, Hedo at least leaves a positive effect on his new squad.

(The Cancer Effect statistic is calculated simply by totaling the increase in losses suffered by a team after picking up a player plus the increase in wins enjoyed by the team departed by the player. CE was used in the ‘Almanac to measure that great disruptive force Stephon Marbury, who scored a +80 in over 10 NBA seasons; all-time CE “leader” going into 2008-09 was the immortal Cadillac Anderson with a tumorous +150.)

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Tomorrow night will see the ESPN premiere of the latest in its “30 for 30” documentary series, “Once Brothers.” This film focuses on the Yugoslavian basketball squads of 1988-1991, dream teams that included rosters filled with names such as Vlade Divac, Drazen Petrovic, Toni Kukoc, Dino Radja, Predrag Danilović, Stojan Vranković, and Jure Zdovc.

When the former Yugoslavia fell into chaos in a bloody civil war, team cornerstones Divac and Petrovic stopped talking, their close friendship instantly shattered in a moment of time in which Divac’s motivations were misunderstood. Despite the fact that they had entered the history books together as FIBA World Champions and again as the first two Yugoslavians to play in the NBA, they would never exchange a word again.

Petrovic was killed in a car accident following the 1992-93 and until the filming of “Once Brothers,” Divac and the other Team Yugoslavia players had never dealt with the demons of war that still affected their lives nearly two decades on.

A joint effort of ESPN and NBA Entertainment, Michael Tolajian was chosen to run the show in this director-centric series. Tolajian first came to NBA Entertainment straight out of college in 1989, “back when there was maybe 30 people working there,” he says. And while Tolajian has since formed his own production company in Los Angeles and has had a hand in many projects, including the “World Series of Poker” TV program since 2006, he always seems to come back to basketball.

Maybe most notably, Tolajian produced the 2000 documentary “Whatever Happened to Michael Ray?” for NBA Entertainment, a fantastic (and cameo-packed) look at the rise and fall of late 1970s/early 80s superstar “Sugar Ray” Richardson narrated with gusto by Chris Rock. His “I Am A Celtic” is a look at the 2006-07 Boston Three Party as seen through the eyes of legends Sam Jones, John Havlicek and Bob Cousy.

Tolajian talked with BallinEurope about “Once Brothers,” a highly personal story that encompasses much of the human experience itself – as well as present some fantastic international basketball history.

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Parker leads 11 French NBAers

With NBA teams starting to get warmed up for the regular season tipoff, BallinEurope figured it high time to take stock of the European players prospectively set to take the court in America for 2010-11.

In considering the expanded rosters for each of the 30 NBA teams, BiE counted 50 players from The Continent plus one free agent. The asterisk here is Linas Kleiza, who carries an American passport and in fact has played organized ball in the ‘States since high school, but hey: He’s a Team Lithuania guy, so he makes this list.

A country-by-country tally produces some interesting results. France again leads all non-U.S. nations in supplying players. In fact, had Yakhouba Diawara not taken his talents out of South Beach in favor of Italia Serie A’s New Basket Brindisi, the ineffable signing of Papa Sy would have given La Republique a potential full roster of 12 NBA players.

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It was only a matter of time before someone came up with this, BallinEurope supposes, and could be an interesting way to mobilize European fan bases this summer. An outfit called Coyle Media is now tracking the performance of professional sports teams and organizations on social networking media Facebook and Twitter pages.

The “Sports Fan Graph” lists about 250 organizations in nine sports, sortable by sport or overall, and simply updates the numbers daily. In basketball, the leader on the board is naturally the NBA (though BiE notes the site is not yet tracking Euroleague Basketball or FIBA follows) with nearly 5 million followers to its credit.

After that, well, things get interesting. Would you believe, for example, that the Purdue Boilermakers basketball team has more followers than nine NBA teams? They’re even out-Facebooking the Philadelphia 76ers and Miami Heat! And what does it mean to say that the Orlando Magic and Boston Celtics have a million followers on Facebook and Twitter, respectively, but are completely tanking (relatively) on the other ‘page?

The real eye-popper of the lot, though, is that pair of European teams sneaking into the Sports Fan Graph basketball top 35. Aaaaaaaaaand … you guessed it: Those two teams would be Zalgiris Kaunas (no. 22 overall with 40,346 followers) and Lietuvos Rytas (no. 34 with 14,156).

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Team Spain’s Sergio Rodriguez is coming home to play professional ball through 2013, as Real Madrid this afternoon announced the New York Knicks free agent had signed a contract with the ACB team.

Just about a month ago, word had leaked that Rodriguez had in fact agreed in principle to … a three-year deal with Real Madrid, but his agent took great pains to state that Rodriguez hadn’t made any deal, officially.

Rodriguez played for the Sacramento Kings and New York Knicks last season, going for 7.4 points and 3.4 assists in 27 games with the latter.

And o yeah, video highlights follow the break.

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While everyone else in the basketball universe is watching the minute-by-minute maneuvers of Lebron James, Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh and the like, BallinEurope has an eye on those powers from The Continent who may be moving around within the NBA to help reshape rosters for the 2010-11 season. Our man in the U.K., Sam Chadwick, ruminates on the final destinations of 15 European NBA players. Os Davis provides the ever-popular (yeah, surrrrrrrrrrrrrre) fearless predictions.

Right, so everyone knows this is the summer of free agency, with possibly the top free agents ever to come on to the market in the NBA. In total, there are around 17 European players on the market – right now, we’re ranking the top 15.

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With just days to go before 2010 NBA Draft. BallinEurope’s man in the U.K., Sam Chadwick is frantically formulating and reformulating his mock draft board. Today, Chadwick forecasts the first 15 choices in round two, including his homeboy/new best buddy Ryan Richards…

31. New Jersey Nets: Jerome Jordan (7’1”, C, Tulsa, Senior). New Jersey picks up another big man to come off the bench behind Lopez, giving the Nets a starting unit of Devin Harris, Courtney Lee, Chris Douglas-Roberts, prospective no. 3 overall pick Derrick Favors and Lopez, with a second unit of a free-agent PG, Terrico White, Terrance Williams, Yi Jianlian and Jordan.

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