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Photo: imago-images.de – Scanpix
Photo imago-images.de – Scanpix
In May, they decided not to extend 2019-2020. season, the Euroleague leaders had more than 4 months to prepare for 2020-2021. season. After playing just two rounds of the new season, it is clear that the preparation was superficial and destroyed the confidence in the league and its leaders.
Let’s be open: last Saturday’s match in Mytiščiai between local Chimki and Kaunas Žalgiris was not of the best quality. And not only because in the last quarter “Žalgiris” failed to beat the rival zone defense.
Chimki registered 8 players for the match, but one of them, Dairis Bertans, who was unable to play, did so only because of the requirement of having at least 8 basketball players.
Chimki was struck by injuries and a coronavirus, for which they competed in a rotation of seven people, one of whom was a twenty-year-old rookie. Basketball players had to watch out for fouls, play out of position, and lose strength.
And yet, at the end of the day, the Euroleague could say that it was all a success: the match was played, the result was in the files, we moved on.
Chimki will travel to Spain this week after biting his teeth, where he will play two more games with a minimal line-up. Again, there is no need to dream of quality, but what will be done will be done: the game will be played.
This situation would be scored in the “as is” category at the beginning of the season, and no one would be overwhelmed by this, if not another case of Zenit in St. Petersburg.
The coronavirus hooked 8 basketball players in the team, so yesterday the club itself, without receiving a response from the Euroleague, decided not to go to Spain, where it had to play two games.
Here is a fact that can be overlooked, but it is extremely important, so I will repeat: Zenit did not receive a response from the Euroleague on what to do for them, so they decided not to go to the game themselves.
This is a typical Euroleague – if you ask an urgent question (and even more so not described in the textbook), you will have to wait a long time for an answer. The St. Petersburg team didn’t even expect it.
Waking up after Zenit’s announcement, the Euroleague has announced that the team’s two matches this week will not take place and will be decided in accordance with Euroleague regulations and the rules for COVID-19.
The problem is that the Euroleague did not clearly define what would happen if 8 players could not play because of the coronavirus. It was planned what to do if the match could not take place in a particular country due to its laws, what to do if one or two basketball players drop out, whatever the plan and protocol for the dropout of 8 players is not fully defined.
TASS Photo – Scanpix
Whether all teams meet the proper health and safety requirements is debatable, one may wonder why most infections are related to Russian clubs, but this is all secondary.
The key question is: why is EuroLeague Plan A so primitive?
A traditional schedule was approved in July, with teams playing the traditional regular season from October through April.
Match transfers are only expected if they take place more than 15 days before the match.
There were no intervals or free weeks during which these postponed games could be played.
As in any other year, the Euroleague will only come to a halt in mid-February, when cup competitions are traditionally played in Europe.
The Euroleague has decided that the competition will take place on a bulldozer basis and teams that cannot play will be penalized 0:20. The Cedevita Olimpija in Ljubljana, which complied with Slovenian law and ended its 10-day quarantine, had already been sanctioned.
I will repeat that the Ljubljana Club was sanctioned simply for following the order of its own country.
0:20 is a cruel penalty in basketball, as getting a technical loss is even worse than losing a game by 40 points. Under the FIBA system, a win is worth two points, a loss is one, a technical loss is zero.
This means that if multiple teams score equal wins and losses at the end of the season, the team with at least one technical loss will be behind. Not only that, it will be below a team with fewer victories. What if the team of such technical defeats has two or three?
Technical defeats are an embarrassing exit even for the amateur leagues, so the Euroleague should avoid them as best it can.
That is already being done; In theory, that match in Mytiščiai should have been a technical defeat for the Chimki team, as they were unable to get the test results in time. However, the human decision was then made to delay the match one day.
It is realistic that in the case of Zenit this will also be done and the matches will be postponed to a later date. The only problem is that the calendar, as I said, does not foresee days off.
Even if the Zenit team puts those matches on the calendar by creating more double weeks, what if there are more cases like Zenit’s? If you have to postpone not two, but four, eight or 15 games?
The Euroleague waited until mid-September to confirm its order for next season and had not previously spoken to either the national championships or the FIBA to agree on possible schedule changes. As a result, the Euroleague bubble is hard to imagine, it is simply not coordinated with other leagues to free teams for national championships.
The national leagues with the Euroleague may not even enter into dialogue, as all bridges between these sides have burned down in recent years. Whereas in the past the leaders of the country championships were invited to discussions with the Euroleague and some of them were even members of the Euroleague, in recent years the Euroleague has gotten angry with everyone it could.
The Euroleague is now on a ground shaking and cracking under his feet, and his only way out seems to be to pray and hope that the ground will just stop shaking.
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