In honor of Victory Day...Mishaaverko

[dobko]

mishaaverko
Senior Member

Registered: Feb 2003
Posts: 976
In honor of Victory Day
http://www.themoscowtimes.com/storie...05/05/091.html

Thursday, May 5, 2005. Issue 3160. Page 16.

Europe's Finest Cagers Hit Town

By Carl Schreck
Staff Writer

For MT

The eyes of the basketball world will turn to Moscow this weekend as thousands of foreign fans are set to converge on the city amid Victory Day celebrations for European basketball's premier annual event, the Euroleague Final Four.

More than 13,000 fans are expected to pack Olimpiisky Stadium on Friday and Sunday for the four-team tournament, which will determine the champion of the Euroleague, Europe's most prestigious club competition and the basketball equivalent of soccer's Champions League.

The tournament -- featuring hometown favorite CSKA Moscow, the most dominant team in Europe this year; Maccabi Tel Aviv from Israel; Tau Ceramica from Spain; and Panathinaikos from Greece -- has become one of the hottest tickets in town. Officials from CSKA and the Euroleague are predicting a sellout, while government officials and high-profile businessmen have secured courtside seats for what they hope will be a triumph for CSKA, known as the Red Army team, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany.

The event will kick off Friday evening at 6:30 p.m. with an opening ceremony led by Mayor Yury Luzhkov. The first semifinal between defending Euroleague champion Maccabi and Panathinaikos is scheduled to start at 7:10 p.m. The second semifinal between CSKA and Tau is set to tip off at 9:40 p.m.


The tournament pits teams from four countries steeped in basketball tradition against each other -- and according to officials from the clubs, more than 4,000 foreign fans will make the trip to Moscow to support their teams. Panathinaikos and Tau both expecting around 600 supporters, while Maccabi expects at least 3,000 fans to follow the defending champion to Moscow.

According to a source close to CSKA management, courtside seats have been reserved for numerous current and former government officials, including Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov, former Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov and President Vladimir Putin's European Union envoy, Sergei Yastrzhembsky. It was unclear if Putin would show up, said the source, who asked to remain unnamed. Putin made an appearance at the opening ceremony of the World Figure Skating Championships in Moscow in March.

Several foreign government officials, including heads of state in town for the Victory Day celebrations, are planning on supporting their countrymen competing in the tournament.

Greek President Karolos Papoulias plans to attend the Panathinaikos-Maccabi matchup, a Greek Embassy spokesman said.

An Israeli Embassy official said that senior embassy officials would attend the semifinal, and that if Maccabi wins its first game, Israeli President Moshe Katsav might attend Sunday's final.

One person who will definitely be watching with interest from courtside is Mikhail Prokhorov, a basketball fanatic and controlling owner of Norilsk Nickel with Vladimir Potanin, with whom he is tied for the honors of Russia's seventh-richest man with an estimated fortune of $4.4 billion, according to Forbes.

Under the patronage of Prokhorov, who has a controlling stake in the club, CSKA General Manager Sergei Kushchenko has put together a staggeringly talented -- and expensive -- roster by European standards, with the aim of returning the club to the pinnacle of European basketball. The club's budget this year is well more than $20 million.

CSKA is in the final year of a three-year project under Kushchenko to win the Euroleague championship, which has eluded the club each of the past two years. Both times CSKA crashed out in the Final Four semifinals to the home team -- Barcelona in 2003 and Maccabi in 2004, both of whom went on to win the title.

The CSKA budget will likely be significantly lower next season and Kushchenko told Sport-Express last month that winning this year was "a must."

"No one in the club ... will accept anything less than a Euroleague title," Kushchenko told the newspaper.

Regardless of who emerges as the victor, the Final Four promises to be a memorable event, one which CSKA officials are calling a "celebration of basketball."

The visiting teams all come from countries with rabid basketball followers, and despite the fact that CSKA will have the majority of fans, they might have difficulty shouting down the vociferous 3,000-strong Maccabi contingent, which could include hundreds of additional Israeli fans either based in Moscow or coming to town from other countries.

"The 3,000 fans are just the ones we know are coming," said Maccabi spokesman Mike Karnon. "Several hundred more that we don't know about could be coming from Europe, or even from the United States. It always happens like that."

European basketball events, in contrast to their American counterparts, have a long history of turning into rowdy, sometimes violent, affairs.

At the 1999 Final Four in Munich, Italian fans launched burning flares onto the floor before security guards quashed the incident with the help of their billy clubs. Greek fans, in particular, are notorious for hurling objects onto the court, heated coins being a preferred projectile.

Security at the event will be tight -- a joint effort between private security guards and city police, the CSKA source said, though he declined to give the size of the security force.

A six-person delegation from the National Basketball Association will be in Moscow for the event, along with officials and scouts from around 15 NBA teams, NBA spokesman Terry Lyons said in an e-mail message.

The NBA, the world's strongest league, has sent staff to every Final Four since 1988, and in recent years the event has become a scouting hotbed for NBA teams searching for undiscovered European talent.

If the last two Final Fours are any indication, NBA scouts and coaches will be swarming the eight-team junior tournament, which will be held Friday through Sunday in auxiliary gymnasiums at Olimpiisky, featuring young prospects from Italy, Lithuania, Greece, Turkey, Spain, Israel and Russia.

Around 450 journalists from 25 countries will be covering the main event, which will also be aired on television in more than 25 countries. Both Friday's and Sunday's games will be broadcast live on RTR Sport.

[mishaaverko]

Andrei Kirilenko of the Utah Jazz is RUSSIA'S best hoopster.

AK 47 as he's known is quite proud of his RUSSIAN heritage.