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The next Blinebury prescription will be for the rockets to..

Discussion in 'Houston Rockets: Game Action & Roster Moves' started by DearRock, May 14, 2002.

  1. DearRock

    DearRock Member

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    .......not miss the revolution. We need a european on our team.



    Bob Kravitz

    Basketball's future resides in Europe



    May 13, 2002


    So, if you were wondering about all this "Bob's on assignment" business -- or even if you weren't -- here's the deal: I just spent a week in Italy watching a basketball revolution. (By the way, gondoliers don't give receipts.)

    And at the risk of sounding like a shill for the promoters of the World Basketball Championships this summer, I'm here to tell you, it's going to provide some of the most compelling and refreshingly different basketball you've ever seen. If you think the NBA-pedigreed American team is going to roll the field, think again.






    "People ask me, 'When was the turning point for international basketball?' " said Mike D'Antoni, a former NBA coach who has returned to a country where he is regarded as the Pat Riley of Italy. "I think the turning point is right now. You look at Pau Gasol getting (NBA) Rookie of the Year, the fact (five of 11 players) on the all-rookie team are foreign, and you have Sacramento and Dallas playing the most exciting basketball in the league right now with so many international players, I mean, this is it. The revolution is now."

    Here's why I went to Italy -- well, besides the extradition order: to watch the Euroleague Final Four in the city of Bologna. The Euroleague is, in essence, the European NBA, and the league finals are played in a collegiate Final Four format. While there, I put together a story on the explosion of international hoops and pieces on four of the players who will be featured here during the World Championships.

    After that, I went north and spent time in Treviso, a picturesque city north of Venice, where I caught up with one-time Pacer Tyus Edney and two future NBA players currently on D'Antoni's Benetton Treviso roster -- Bostjan Nachbar, a likely first-round pick this year, and 19-year-old 7-foot project Nickoloz Tskitishvili, who is still deciding whether to opt for the draft.

    Those stories will run over the course of the next few months, leading up to and during the World Championships. In the course of my research, though, I saw for myself how and why the face of international basketball, and NBA basketball, is changing. (I also gained about eight pounds, but that's another story.)

    To put it simply, those guys can play. They can not only play, but they play a wonderfully different kind of basketball -- fast, entertaining, a penetrate-and-dish game that looks like an altogether different sport than the one being played by Boston and Detroit.

    The stultifying two-man game? Not in Euroball.

    "I see NBA games on TV, and it's all muscles," said Nachbar, a Slovenian sharpshooter who is expected to be a top-15 pick. "Our game brings a lot more skill to the court."

    The Sacramento-Dallas brand of basketball is the future of the NBA. And the best place to find players who understand that kind of game is overseas. The Euroleague Final Four drew a who's-who of big-name NBA talent evaluators.

    "A few years ago, we might have two NBA scouts around, and they weren't even the big guys, maybe just the teams' European scouts," D'Antoni said. "This year, we've had at least 35 scouts watching our games. And now they're the main people."

    No, it's not the fertile American college scene -- or American high school scene, for that matter -- and likely never will be. But since Drazen Petrovic broke the barrier, the number of international players has increased exponentially.

    The World Championships couldn't be making their debut on American soil at a more important time in the game's history.

    Welcome, as they say, to the revolution.


    --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Bob Kravitz is a columnist for The Indianapolis Star. Contact him at 1-317-444-6643 or via e-mail at bob.kravitz@indystar.com
     

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