You can do it with national players: two cases from Turkish Basketball League
You can do it with national players: two cases from Turkish Basketball League
At the beginning of the season, everybody said that the rule of having a maximum of 5 foreign players per game squad is a bad one for Turkish basketball. I think it is a very good one for them and below I will present two cases from the last round of the Turkish Basketball League who support this idea.
We all see what happened in Italy this weekend where all 10 starting players were foreigners. Well, this rule from the Turkish Basketball League has prevented seeing a similar case. This rule will help Turkey`s basketball to develop and also will help the national team in future competitions.
Now I will present two interesting cases from the last round of Turkish Basketball:
- Banvit beat Darussafaka away with 89-82. Banvit had only 3 foreign players in the squad for this match. Alongside them, there were 3 Turkish players that played at least 24 minutes and other 3 that played like 5 minutes. What`s the most important thing is that the median age of all six Turkish players was 21! Darussafaka had 5 foreign players, but that didn`t matter in front of a bunch of young Turkish players. For Darussafaka the chances to reach the playoffs have significantly decreased, despite having a squad build for Euroleague. And what is more interesting and proves even better the idea of reducing the foreigner number: 2 foreign players from Banvit (Alex Perez and D. J. Shelton) combined for more points (48) than all 5 foreign players of Darussafaka (46).
- In the other game of this round, Besiktas beat Bahcesehir at home with 80-78. Besiktas had as well only 3 foreign players in the squad and also a Serbian-born Turkish player. On the other hand, Bahcesehir had 5 foreign players and all played over 30 minutes each. For Besiktas, the main scorers were two Turkish players and the team used in total 8 Turkish players for this confrontation, and 5 of them playing over 12 minutes. This long rotation helped Besiktas to achieve a big result in their chase for playoffs.
The Turkish Basketball League was fed up with all the foreign players that came in the league just for money or personal records and the rule to reduce their number helps a lot the national players to develop by seeing more minutes on the court, in order to be ready to face further challenges.
This has to be an example for all the national basketball federations of Europe!
photo credit: championsleague.basketball
Bogdan Vasile Tirc, info@brainbasketball.net
