Many American players won’t come back when Israeli league resumes
The basketball activities will reopen soon in Israel and the American players are expected to come back to train with their teams in order to be ready for the season resuming as planned on June 20. Then the championship will be played till the end of July.
But it seems that many fellow Americans don’t want to come back and play for their teams when the season resumes. That’s the reason for signing other players to replace them. Till now, the Israeli teams have signed during the last days 13 new players like Desi Washington, Tim Coleman, Evan Bruinsma, Cameron Oliver, Shannon Shorter, Jimmy Hall, Paul Delaney, Shavon Coleman and so on. The clubs have now to rebuild their rosters after many players went home to the USA and were too scared by the Coronavirus to come back and play again.
This situation reveals how easy to be scared are the American players who feel safer in their country, the United States, even if there the virus situation is between the worst in the world. Currently, according to Worldometers, in the USA there are 4558 cases/ 1 million people and 272 deaths/ 1 million people. In the same time, in Israel, the stats regarding the virus are much better: only 1923 cases/ 1 million people and 31 deaths/ 1 million people. So it seems that the Israeli authorities have managed very well the crisis and that’s why the domestic league can safely restart on 20 June. Playing in Israel could be much safer than staying in the USA, watching Netflix on the couch. But the Americans don’t understand that. Some of them are returning these days, but others stated very clear they won’t be back.
This is another lesson as well about the importance of the local players for each club in Europe. Having many homegrown players will help the European teams to be better prepared for this kind of situations, which can appear again in the future. The mercenaries are coming and going, but the local players are staying.
Photo: Basketball Champions League
Gratian Cormos
