The Euroleague draw in the 2019/20 season, starting on October 3 with a duel between Khimki near Moscow and Tel Aviv-based Maccabi, will be experimental in nature. Having successfully tested and tested the format of a single regular championship with 16 teams (before the competition consisted of several group rounds, after which the number of participants was inevitably reduced), managers from the Euroleague decided to expand.
From a purely mathematical point of view, it may be insignificant - there will now be 18 applicants for the continental crown - but it has had a serious impact on the schedule and transfer policy of each club.
All competitors expect nine weeks at once with “paired” rounds (that is, two matches in three days), not to mention the fact that they still have to fight for a place in the sun in very competitive national championships.
Absolutely everyone had to take into account the increase in the number of regular season matches from 30 to 34 - and, therefore, the factor of additional burden on key basketball players, multiplied by inevitable injuries. From ASVEL, returning France to the Euroleague geographical map, to the current champions from CSKA, who have actively and very unconventionally worked on the composition of the squad in the summer off-season.
Therefore, the upcoming Euroleague season promises to be one of the most interesting and unpredictable for many years. Nobody knows for sure how the newcomers and “returnees” will show themselves, in which the neutral fans have already missed (we are talking about ASVEL, the Russian “Zenith”, the German “Alba”, the Serbian “Red Star” and the Spanish “Valencia”), as well as doesn’t imagine how effective the grandiose investments of Barcelona can be, aimed at returning to the number of participants of the Final Four.
Just three domestic teams going to the start of the regular season (this, incidentally, happens only the second time in history) will have to participate in a grandiose “meat grinder”, but each of them has their own trump cards that allow them to set ambitious goals and successfully solve them.
CSKA: large-scale champion update
The second in four years, the triumph in the Euroleague automatically extended the credit of trust issued by the leadership of the army team coach Dimitris Itoudis. In the capital, they are used to determining the success of a coach based on the results on the international stage (VTB CSKA has not been losing the VTB United League for eight consecutive years), and the Greek, albeit not without adventure, has successfully completed his mission.
However, Muscovites did not begin to retain the championship. And, perhaps, they did the right thing: in the spring of 2019, the next cycle of the team came to an end, and she desperately needed fresh blood to remain extremely motivated and charged to fight in every next match.
The back line of CSKA has changed beyond recognition: not only the Spanish maestro Sergio Rodriguez left the team, but also Nando de Colo with Corey Higgins, with whom fans are accustomed to associate the successes of the Itudis era. The Frenchman, who became the bronze medalist of the recent World Cup in China, even seemed to have options for employment in the NBA, although in the end he and the American scorer remained in the Old World, strengthening the Turkish Fenerbahce and the Spanish Barcelona, respectively.
Othello Hunter, who had an important role in the Itoudis rotation, accepted the Maccabi offer, where he reunited with the specialist Ioannis Spheropoulos, whom he knew well. Finally, Alek Peters, who did not play in Europe on his first attempt, went to the Turkish “Anadolu Ephesus”, although his losses in the army camp, most likely, would not even be noticed.
But instead of trite some star basketball players (and it’s impossible to name Rodriguez, de Colo and Higgins as privates if they wanted to) to replace them with others, the Moscow club acted a little more varied. In general, of course, it was not without loud transfers - the best scorer of the last Euroleague draw, American defender Mike James, who could be entrusted to Itoudis headquarters with the mission of saving one or another match by pure individual skill, moved from the Italian “Milan” to the capital of Russia .
For the rest, CSKA was staffed in two directions: either basketball players with growth potential were invited to Moscow - like German center Johannes Vogtmann and American defender Ron Baker, who had previously played only in North America - or players who could add an already powerful roster of depth and variability.
Thus, the Latvian station wagon Janis Strelnieks, who has great international experience, was able to close the positions of the point guard and attacking defender, the Swingman from the Spanish “Basque Country” Darrun Hilliard and the Greek Costa Koufos - a classic overall center that will be “nightmare” when used correctly. CSKA rivals in the three-second zone.
Taking into account Daniel Hackett, Will Kleiburn and Kyle Hines remaining in Moscow, as well as a whole scattering of Russian collections led by Andrei Vorontsevich and Nikita Kurbanov, Itudis has at his disposal a dozen and a half performers with whom you can play any kind of basketball. Both the high-speed and positional “buggy” with throws in the last seconds of possession: there are plenty of tools in the capital's team to impose a comfortable pace and beat opponents' weaknesses.
Another thing is that due to the scale of personnel shifts - almost half of the team was updated and six new legionnaires appeared in the team - the CSKA coaching staff will need time to rebuild the entire game system and establish interaction between summer signatories and old-timers.
That is why one should not be surprised at the defeat of the red-blue from the Yenisei in the first official match of the 2019/20 season as part of the VTB United League: something like this was bound to happen now and will certainly be repeated one more time or another in the autumn part of the campaign. Now Muscovites, who are unlikely to experience any significant problems with getting into the Euroleague playoffs, can afford to take risks and make mistakes. The moment of truth for the wards of Itoudis, as always, will come in the spring.
Khimki and Zenit: in the fight for European authority
Summer permutations in two other Russian teams that have received the right to represent their country in the Euroleague (Khimki will play in the most prestigious club competition of the Old World as VTB United League vice champions, and Zenit become the lucky winner of wild card from the tournament organizers), Were even more global in nature - and there are objective reasons.
The Moscow Region club was hardly satisfied with its last year’s result: having one of the highest paid basketball players on the continent, Alexei Shved, the yellow-blue fell out of the fight for a place in the playoff zone long before the end of the regular season and eventually finished fourth from the end, having won only nine wins in 30 matches.
Petersburgers, in turn, had to revise the whole concept of the formation of the composition. Being a competitive organization at the Eurocup level, where Zenit did not even reach the quarter finals last season, and the Euroleague are completely different things, and 11 newcomers (despite the fact that only 12 people get into the application for each particular match) confirm this thesis .
Moreover, in the city on the Neva River, not only the legionnaire part of the roster was strengthened, which has completely changed, but also the Russian one: in order to adequately fight on two fronts, and taking into account the limit on legionnaires existing in the VTB United League, the efforts of Evgeny Voronov, Vladislav Trushkin and Anton Pushkov were obviously not enough.
A big move in the domestic transition market was launched just by Khimki, who lured three prominent basketball players with a Russian passport from Zenit: collections of Sergey Karasev and Evgeny Valiev, as well as Andrei Desyatnikov, who was called to the national team in the past with unique anthropometric data (his growth is 221 centimeters).
We add to this Timofey Mozgov, who returned from overseas to the Moscow Region club, which gave him the way to great sport, and we get a situation, by today's standards, that home-grown performers will have almost primary influence on the results of the Russian team in the Euroleague.
Moreover, both quantitatively and qualitatively - in no case should you write off Vyacheslav Zaitsev, Yegor Vyaltsev and Sergey Monya, who will unload foreigners and will bring tangible benefits at least in the VTB League. It is Khimki from now on that possess the most powerful selection of domestic basketball players in the country.
Although the “Zenith” was not left with nothing. The signing of Dmitry Khvostov, who was the de facto leader of the Russian national team in the past few years, should be considered a rare success. Judging by the World Cup, Andrei Zubkov is in great shape and is a real gain even under the Euroleague. And the experience of Anton Ponkrashov will certainly be appreciated by Joan Plaza, who in a radically updated team is extremely necessary for leaders not only on the site, but also outside it, who can rally the team around him.
Moreover, the legionnaire signatures of St. Petersburg are not only not credible - they simply were not so loud as to “blow up” at least the Russian information space. This is normal for a club debuting in the Euroleague: so far, Zenit is not the same magnet for recognized stars as the conventional CSKA, and it only has to build its own reputation in the European basketball elite.
The 2019/20 season in the northern capital will be started either by basketball players with a name that has already passed the peak of a professional career (for example, 34-year-old Mexican Gustavo Aion, whose record includes performances in the NBA and two Euroleague champion titles with Real Madrid, Spain) . Or high-quality, but little-known performers, for whom a performance under the supervision of the Plaza is an opportunity to loudly declare themselves and significantly increase their own value in the transfer market.
The main thing that is necessary for Khimki with Zenit is to gain stability. And the coaching strategy, and the results, and composition. Last season, the injuries epidemic knocked down the yellow and blue, forcing players to pick up the distances of the regular Euroleague championship, which did not lead to anything good. If a winning culture has been formed in CSKA for a long time, and the “army men”, no matter what local turmoil they may encounter, do not fall below a certain level, then it needs to be built in the Moscow Region and St. Petersburg.
The highly acclaimed in Europe Plaza and the experienced Rimas Kurtinaitis, who failed to save Khimki last season as a crisis manager, understand this very well. But it is impossible to say for sure whether it will work out for them: a series of two or three defeats or a more or less serious injury to a key performer can easily turn the life of even a very wealthy club into a nightmare. Only true top clubs are able to get out of such situations with minimal losses, while Khimki and Petersburgers have yet to gain this status on a continental scale.