Steaua Bucharest: 1 free-throw made and 19 turnovers
In the 2010-2011 season, Steaua Bucharest won against Lokomotiv Kuban Krasnodar in the last game of the group F of Fiba Eurochallenge. It was a historic win, upsetting a strong team with a huge budget.
Steaua did not qualify from the group, but they won all the games at home, and if you realize that Lokomotiv Kuban reaches the final of the competition that year, I think the Romanian team did a good job! (you can watch here the highlights of that game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mW9odoxOw9o)
Now, the situation is totally different: Steaua is struggling not to lose with a big margin with mediocre teams from Ukraine and Kosovo. Yesterday they’ve lost with just 5 points at Sigal Prishtina and it seems like a big triumph, but for the basketball specialist, it is a disaster: to score in the entire game just 1 free-throw from 4 it’s a shame. It means that you don’t attack the rim, you just came to visit Kosovo, because that’s the rule of the competition and then you pack your bags and go home. That is against the spirit of basketball.
And speaking about the opponents, I have to mention that Sigal had a very short rotation, just 6 good players and 2 other local fellows that enter together just 7 minutes. So, against a team without a bench, don’t you try to go to the free-throw line as many time is possible??? Instead of this, Steaua had 19 turnovers!!! Why? Because Steaua too, the same as Prishtina have nothing on the bench!!!
This situation is emblematic for Romanian basketball: they don’t grow new local talents, so they don’t have a large rotation! The teams in Romania has 6 foreigners legionary, who come just for the money and the stats and nobody cares about growing Romanian quality players who can make the rotation of the team larger!
I gave the example with the same team Steaua from 2010-2011 because at that moment the Romanian players of this team were absolutely great: Virgil Stanescu, Bogdan Popescu, Virgil Carutasu, Andrei Mandache. They had made a difference!
Now, Steaua Bucharest has just Andrei Mandache! And in the yesterday game at Prishtina, the entire bench of Steaua (the Romanians and Uros Lucic had together exactly 0,00 efficiency value!)
Graţian Cormoş, info@brainbasketball.net
