Probably the thing that I love most about international basketball is the ability for players to move up. In the international system players have the opportunity to play against older players under the same roof and within the same “institution.” This provides the talented players with the constant opportunity to have to prove themselves and push themselves the to the limit in an organized setting. Avoiding the “superstar” effect that is so common in the United States. Without this opportunity, the top players in the states have no need to push themselves and can be successful while going at 60 or 70%. Thus training themselves to play at this pace and when the moment comes and they need to go 100% many of them simply can’t because they have been going at half speed for so long.
There is one place where players in the states can get this opportunity, the park. While here in Europe players in the youth ranks are constantly moving up to practice or play with older teams, either because they are skilled and the club wants them to continue to develop and not become complacent, or because of injuries or other absences and the team simply needs bodies to be able to run a full practice. Regardless the reason, the outcome is positive: a player competing against guys that are older, more experienced, and faster than what the player is used to. Serving as a constant reminder that there are guys better than you and you need to go 100% to have a chance to be successful in anything, especially in sports.
For me as a coach, I hope that my journey at one point includes being the head coach of a senior team in a club so that I can bring up some young players and give them their first minutes as a Senior. As my last coach always used to say, you can only play basketball one way. You can’t turn it on and off, it’s either you’re going all out all the time, or you’re not. And I think bringing up kids to the next level is an excellent opportunity to motivate them and instill this idea in their mind as when they come up for that first practice their eyes and ears are wide open with excitement and energy making moving up one of my favorite things about basketball in Europe.
A few things that were noteworthy, the two top teams FC Barcelona and DKV Juventud (where Rubio developed) only did left handed layup lines, they just didn’t even do right handed layups. I thought that was very interesting, it is something I do with my kids to some extent but I only saw those two clubs do left handed layup lines. In all of the games that I watched, I did not see any team call one play and very very few pick and rolls. The kids are playing man to man defense and just playing how they feel and see. That is to say the coaches are not telling them what they need to do or what should look for. Obviously these teams had good understandings of spacing on the court and the importance of movement without the ball but there were no set plays. I can remember from the time I started playing basketball we had set plays. Not giving preference one way or another but I think it is necessary for players to have a time in their formation when they find their own solutions to situations on the basketball court, for many kids in the states we get this experience on the playgrounds.
The other game was a classic, actually better put it was “El Classico” a Barca vs Madrid and it was a lacked a little bit of the energy and tension of the futbol version. Barca beat down Madrid in all aspects of the game and ended the game by closing down the scoreboard or going up by 50 points on a dime by the smallest guy on the court, a pg for Barca to a cutting big man and then a pretty emphatic celebration.