Since I did not feel like spending the whole day at the office again, I saw that I also can watch the Euroleague Top 16 draw LIVE on Italian free TV. So here I am – trying to follow the draw without speaking too much Italian.
Once again, like at every official Euroleague event there is the Euroleague trophy next to Eddy Vidat who does the introduction of Jordi Bertomeu.
Bertomeu went through all the sponsors and broadcasters, also mentioning the new partnership with China to show Euroleague games on the Asian continent.
One interesting note: Since we started this blog we always got the impression that FIBA and the organization of the Euroleague don’t really get along with each other. Jordi Bertomeu talked about the FIBA in his speech by saying that without FIBA they would have never had the Euroleague competition. So to me this does not look like it at all that at least the Euroleague has any problems with FIBA. I my opinion it does not help anyway if there are two Basketball organizations in Europe that don’t work together. We will see if there will be some major changes to bring FIBA and the Euroleague together again.
Before the actual drawing began, they showed Larzaros. I know you should not make fun of people for their looks but Lazaros does look even funnier in a suite.
On SportItalia (Italian TV station) they just showed the highlights of the regular season which is really cool. I hope I can find that later as a video somewhere on Euroleague.net. This is really good advertising for what Europe is capable of and especially how entertaining Euroleague basketball can be – great job with that video!
This show is getting better and better. They just showed Vlade Divac kind of hiding behind a wall with his well known beard kind.
Remember how the NBA created some rules to make the games more interesting? While the host Eddy Vidat goes through the restrictions I kind of get the same feeling with this. Things like – you can’t have more than two teams from the same country n one Top 16 group makes sense of course but it also is in the interest of the viewers right?
Raul Lopez does the draw and takes the first team which is Panathinaikos Athens and will be go to group D, while Rytas goes to E, Real Madrid to F and CSKA to group G. Who will join Panathinaikos in group D? Unicaja Malaga! Tel Aviv will join Real Madrid while Tau Will join Rytas and Siena will have to trade places with Unicaja because of the restrictions. So Unicaja joins CSKA while Siena goes to group Panathinaikos.
Thanks to all these restrictions it does not make sense to write down the whole drawing since the teams switch the groups all the time. I think if you would have followed all the restriction you probably knew already anyway who has to play which team.
Now that the drawing is completed I must say “Thank you” to all the people who did the drawing. I will get to see a lot of good basketball LIVE in Roma since they have to play CSKA Moscow, FC AXA Barcelona and Unicaja. What a great group to follow!
