If usually It is already difficult to find players trained in Spain with which to cover the four places that the ACB requires of its teams to be able to compete, the paradigm shift of recent years with the increasingly elongated tentacles of the United States university league is making this task extremely difficult for clubs like Baskonia.
The Barça sports management must work hard again this season to find a player to complement Tadas Sedekerskis, Khalifa Diop and Sander Raieste and fill the gap left by Dani Díez, whom the entity has decided not to renew.
Baskonia revives the problem with quotas
The club has managed in the past to generate its own places as in the current cases of Sedekerskis and Raieste or the recent ones of Arturs Kurucs and Ilimane Diop, but It is increasingly difficult to train players who are valid to compete in the Euroleague and the ACB and who are not recruited by the NCAA.
The American university league has always posed a danger to European youth teams, butBefore the clubs of the old continent could compete with this by offering their promises a salary which was historically prohibited from receiving in the NCAA as it is not considered a professional competition.
However, that changed completely in the 2021-22 campaignwhen a new regulation came in that allows players to collect emoluments indirectly through sponsorship contracts called NIL (acronym for name image and likeness in English).
“It’s exciting to retire and to receive love from Vitoria so long later”
With this, the attraction of the best showcase to make the leap to the NBA was added contracts similar to those of the great stars of the Euroleaguewhich makes the task of retaining the greatest European pearls a utopia. It is difficult to imagine that cases like that of Luka Doncic, who played as a professional for Real Madrid before being chosen in the NBA draft, repeat themselves again in the current context.
Names heading to the NCAA
More and more players are leaving Europe to develop in the university league and this summer Real Madrid and Barcelona have been the most affected. The 17-year-old Senegalese center Ismaila Diagne and the 18 year old Russian escort Egor Demin, the two great promises of the white youth academy, have signed for Gonzaga University and Brigham Young respectively. The 18-year-old Lithuanian point guard Kaspars Jakucionisfor his part, has left Barça and signed a contract of 750,000 gross dollars with the University of Illinois, unthinkable figures in the Euroleague for such a young player who has not even entered the first team dynamic yet.
Joventut de Badalona also loses the young Portuguese center Ruben Prey, who is going to the University of Sant John’s after having played only 19 ACB matches with the Catalan team. In this case, yes, the green-black club has tried a different strategy by allowing his departure in a one-year loan that will allow Prey to be kept under contract and return next summer to Badalona.
Yes indeed, Baskonia explored a similar formula when they loaned their youth player Sidy Cissoko to the young talent team of the Development League of the NBA (G-League Ignite) and the French exterior He never returned to Vitoria, since he was selected in the draft the following year. At least he did obtain financial compensation for his goodbye.
Said G-League Ignite was precisely one of the factors that pushed the NCAA to change its policy and This summer it has disappeared definitively after being eclipsed due to the strength of university contracts.
Cissoko signs for three seasons with the Spurs
He Navarrese power forward Great Osobor, for example, will charge two million dollars next year for playing for the Washington Huskies, becoming the highest-paid player in NCAA history. A record that, due to the dynamics of recent years and the growing league revenue (1.3 billion dollars invoiced in 2023) will not take long to be surpassed.
Headache
Those mentioned are not the only players who have crossed the Atlantic in recent times. In 2023 Candidate Mara He left Zaragoza in exchange for a contract close to a million dollars with UCLA, where he played with the Madrid youth squad. Jan Vide. Conrad Martínez and Dwayne Aristode They left Joventut and Santiago Trouet He changed Estudiantes for the University of San Diego. They preceded them Alvaro Folgueiras (Unicaja), Daddy Miller e Be Almansa (Real Madrid).
The NCAA roller is not going to slow down and forces ACB clubs to rethink their strategy with the quarry, it is going to be increasingly difficult for all the work and money invested in the training categories to be rewarded with the arrival of quality places in the first team. The dilemma, of course, is difficult to solve.
2024-06-23 18:36:51
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