Spanish Basketball Team Faces Setback as Ricky Rubio Withdraws from World Cup for Mental Health Reasons

Assimilated the setback of knowing that Ricky Rubio will not be in the next Basketball World Cup to take care of his mental health, the Spanish team is already looking for solutions. Sergio Scariolo, a specialist in optimizing resources when it seems that he is running out of steam, appeared before the media this Monday. Next to him, the tireless captain Rudy Fernández, 38 years old. Both close ranks around La Familia, which defends its title in an appointment that will start in just three weeks.

“What has happened is a very personal matter. We have to be as close as we can to encourage and support him. Ricky is not just a player on this team, he is like a nephew to me and that is what counts for him”, Scariolo assessed after training in Malaga. For his part, Rudy has said he was annoyed for not realizing the situation “to be with him at that moment when he needed us so much.” Although in his opinion, the significant loss will not change anything in the preparation: “Ricky is working on his well-being right now and we have 16 players who are going to give 100% and deserve the same respect.”

Rubio was the MVP of the World Cup in China in 2019 and was aiming to be one of the stars of the World Cup. His absence adds to that of the injured Lorenzo Brown, who was key in the past Eurobasket, where the team won the title. Without the two most renowned players for that position, Scariolo only has the young Alberto Díaz and the veteran Sergio Llull for the big event in Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia. Both Unicaja and Real Madrid gave a great performance in the Eurobasket, although the Italian coach understands that he should not ask them for more due to the absence of the Catalan: “Can Alberto [Díaz] have a few more minutes? Maybe yes. But it is a matter of presence in the field, not so much that he has to do different things”.

The main candidate to replace Ricky is called Juan Núñez. The 19-year-old point guard who plays for German Ulm is one step away from going to the last Eurobasket. He was the last discard from the squad before traveling to Georgia. This time he had not entered the initial list, but he was going to be one of the youngsters who would help in the training of the National Team within the Golden Boys 2.0 project. His arrival last week already indicated that something was wrong with Rubio, and he glimpsed that Scariolo sees him as his natural substitute.

Núñez had minutes in the friendly against Venezuela, scored three points and has joined the list of 16. Although the young man is not the only option to replace Ricky. Jaime Fernández and Alberto Abalde could also adapt to the position. The former has mainly played as an escort in Malaga and Tenerife, although at the beginning of his career he played as a point guard. This position is not strange to Abalde either, since at times when there were many casualties at Real Madrid, he has come to play the role of directing the game.

What Scariolo himself has ruled out is incorporating another player: “We don’t have the possibility of incorporating anyone, we have to look forward. From this group of 16, the 12 that will be in the World Cup will come out. We don’t have much room other than to have confidence in the players who are there. There are no magic formulas.”

It is a great challenge for Scariolo’s team to enlarge his legend in the face of adversity and against rivals such as the United States, Slovenia, Serbia or France. The coach stresses the importance of teamwork. “If we don’t put that plus, which we have almost always achieved, we will be a normal team. At the level of talent we are normal ”, he settled.

The obstacles of the ‘Wonder Boy’

Ricky Rubio’s career, a precocious talent like few others, has not been a bed of roses. After being the youngest player to debut in the ACB, it didn’t take long for him to stand out at Joventut, Barça and the Spanish team, reaching his dream of the NBA in 2011. There he has gone through Minnesota, Utah, Phoenix and Cleveland.

In 2016, the El Masnou base went through a depression. It was when he lost his mother to lung cancer. In 2019, he made it public in a letter. “I blamed the people around me. Blame basketball. Basketball is very important to me, but it has taken a backseat. I know that I can be many other things, ”he remarked then.

Nor was he shy about uncovering the negative side of the NBA, a league as magnetic and longed for by players as it is ungrateful to them and sometimes treats them as pure merchandise. “It is not a dish of good taste that when you are involved in a project, you leave your skin and you see that you are working, at the first change you have to leave,” he said after being transferred in 2020.

In an interview for EL PAÍS in 2021, he acknowledged that he was very hesitant to attend the Tokyo Olympics: “I had already decided that I was not going because it had been a very hard year and I had been a father. But it was hard for me to even sleep. My wife, who knows me better than anyone, convinced me. After all, some Games are a special situation”.

Then came an untimely and serious injury that led him to miss the end of the 2021-2022 season and the Eurobasket. And after recovering, Ricky has once again reached the limit and has been forced to stop.

Catalan is a benchmark in making mental health problems visible, a topic that is no longer taboo in sport. The gymnast Simone Biles, who has recently returned to the highest competition, was another of the standard-bearers making the problem known in the last Games. Michael Phelps, the most gold-plated Olympian of all time, revealed that he had gone through at least three or four periods of depression that put his life in danger. In Spain it happened to a whole Andrés Iniesta and also to Álex Abrines, Ricky Rubio’s teammate in the Spanish team: “I simply lost the illusion and the desire to play,” revealed the Barça player, who will defend La Familia in search of his third world title.

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2023-08-07 20:53:16
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