Professional Basketball: An Intercontinental Comparison

Why are NBA stars sitting out games?  Cavaliers rookie coach David Blatt Was recently asked if anything surprised him about his transition from European basketball to the NBA. He quickly responded with a somewhat unexpected answer: the schedule. Despite notable differences in style of play between the two leagues, Blatt mentioned the struggle of playing multiple games in a week as being the most difficult part about his transition. Though playing more games may seem like a good thing, practices and in-game strategy must be tailored to account for the extra strain being put on player’s bodies in any given week. Practices are few and far between in the NBA. They feature less physical training and instead focus on key strategy adjustments. Physical training takes place in the months leading up to the season, with the hope that players can maintain their form throughout the year. This is a lot to ask of players, and is why coaches have had to become more creative with both their pl...

By Brendan Olski This past weekend, I had the opportunity to meet up with an alum of the club basketball team that I played for in high school while travelling in Dublin. The player, Johnny McCarthy, played Division III basketball at a small liberal-arts university in Amherst, MA called Amherst College. He won Player of the Year for his conference his senior year, graduated this past May, and is currently playing professionally for a club called ITC Basketball based out of Carlow, Ireland. It is fairly common for Divison II, or very successful Division III, basketball players from the U.S. to spend a few years overseas playing professionally. The process begins with the player sending game film and highlights to lots of coaches and is then invited to play for a team if selected in their version of a draft. This is how it went for Johnny, who was able to flush out for me some of the positive and negative aspects of choosing this path instead of joining the workforce right out ...

In NBA basketball, there is a large focus on the "big plays" so to speak. By this, I mean the flashy dunks, or the long three-point shots, or the impossible shots made in traffic. Viewers of the NBA live for moments like these, and arguably watch games to see these moments. While some of the rules of the game are objectively different, there is also a huge difference in just the team mentalities from EuroLeague to the NBA. EuroLeague is much more focused on the team play aspect, where the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. This means more ball screens and much more fundamental play, rather than flashy, from the European teams. On the other hand, the NBA focuses heavily on the individual superstars and plays a much more 1-on-1 type of play, or isolation. This allows for these bigger and flashier plays by the superstars. In the NBA there is also a longer 3-point line, which allows for longer and more impressive shots, and longer quarters of play, which in turn al...

https://as.com/baloncesto/2018/10/18/nba/1539847177_137731.html Luka Doncic, a guard from Slovenia drafted third overall in the 2018 NBA draft, has been seeing success on the floor as a rookie averaging 18 points through his first two games. In fact, this year's draft consisted of 14 international players. This confirms an already present trend of bringing in talent from overseas to bolster team's lineups. This year's NBA rosters feature a total of 108 international players and 65 of them from Europe, a record. Going back to Doncic, this raises questions against the Euroleague's, and in a general sense, the international basketball community's inability to keep star talent. Doncic, being a Euroleague MVP, would have found success had he continued to play for Real Madrid but he opted to move to the states. The grass is greener situation shows that the success of the Euroleague will always be trumped by the powerhouse that is known as football. Without the sizable...