Going to Italy was probably the best thing that could happen to me regarding basketball – OK, the food ain’t bad either and the weather is nice too. Oh, I almost forgot the nice landscape and the nice Italian people.
But back to basketball. Remember that women’s club in Viterbo I told you about where Miss Italia plays? Well I had to go and see her of course. On her team is a very young Greek PG and she plays some good basketball.
Since all these talks about Greece going on lately I had to talk to her and asked her about her favorite player from Greece. She just said “Papaloukas!” with a huge smile on her face. She told me how much she likes his style of playing basketball. Now for those who don’t exactly know Papaloukas – he passes the ball and the people love it when he dishes out some nice assists – even more than scoring. Do you get the point? Maybe that is why Europeans like “their style better”. If you ask anybody in Europe who is involved with professional Basketball why they don’t like the NBA they will tell you one thing: ” I don’t like five-on-one!”.
I also asked the Greek girl – by the way her name is Lolita – what she thinks about Vassilis Spanoulis who played 31 games for the Rockets last season and is back in Europe now. “Spanoulis is a DIVA. He always wants to shoot the ball – never passes. I don’t like that.”
So Lolita said all these things before a test game against Euroleague participant Phard Napoli. After one quarter I knew why she said all these things. She passed the ball so well, gave so many nice assists that the crowd didn’t even care if the girl who got the pass actually made the basket.
But what do you want to see from LeBron James? Dunks and points or 15 assists?
