The Italy of Pozzecco they qualified for the 2025 European Championships before taking the field in Reggio Emilia and losing badly against an Iceland team that had been tarmacked three days earlier at home. Few indications have been obtained from this window for the national teams, given that the theoretically best team, the one with Melli, is also the one that seemed most exhausted. The best things were the Italianization of Grant Basile, who is the type of player we can realistically aim for and who demonstrated with words and deeds attachment at least to his family roots, given that as a team it is totally American, and the inclusion in Dame Sarr’s group, in perspective the swingman who can attack the rim with force, the Cordinier of the situation who offers extra solutions in moments when the shot fails. At the European Championships, from August 27th to September 14th, there will also be Fontecchio, Procida, Polonara, Pajola, perhaps Spagnolo, maybe a Gallinari at the greetings. The position of Mannion needs to be deciphered, which evidently does not excite Pozzecco, and that of Toté who may even have a chance in the next window, in February against Turkey and Hungary. Eurobasket will certainly close the blue era of many players, with a question mark over a coach who is tired of being treated by the media as an influencer and not as a coach. The problem is that Petrucci also sees it this way.
Abolish the three-point shot? It would be the dream of many basketball fans, even if those who talk about it are treated as a provocateur, at best a nostalgic old man. It will also happen to monuments like Dan Peterson and Boscia Tanjevic, who in recent days have underlined how the abuse of the three-point shot has made basketball more boring, in the sense of being equal (even in Europe it is difficult to find real differences between teams, except in the value of individual players) and very limited , with player movements and choices that have disappeared over the decades: it’s not just a problem of dribbling, stopping and shooting from mid-range. Today’s NBA is not comparable to that of 1979, when the three-point shot was introduced by exploiting the idea of the defunct ABA, nor is the rest of the basketball world comparable to that of 1984 when the three-point shot, albeit with different distances, it was introduced everywhere. The discussion is obviously not just technical, because the general public likes things, from dunks to three-pointers, which for the enthusiast are just a part of basketball: it’s as if they put a series of players in football, even phenomenal ones, to shoot from the edge of the penalty area, without building an action. It is impossible to go back, it is possible that we are moving towards an NBA arc in the rest of the world too.
More and more European insiders, including club managers and agents, are taking the landing of the club for granted NBA in Europe starting in 2026, when the current Euroleague commercial contracts will expire. Not with the phantom European division that has been talked about for decades, even if only for logistical and time zone reasons without listing the thousand others, but with an enhanced Champions League, formally under the FIBA brand, which would compete head-on with the Euroleague or more likely he would try to steal some clubs from her, proposing (not to say imposing) a merger. Dejan Bodiroga, who succeeded Jordi Bertomeu at the top of the Euroleague two years ago, was born as a FIBA man and it would be curious if he himself, one of the few champions of the nineties and zero to have always rejected the NBA, was the notary of this American colonization already achieved with the same methods, almost institutional, in Africa even if obviously the tradition of European basketball is not comparable to the African one. Moving from the top systems to today’s reality, we can say that the real big problem of the Euroleague, whose regular season is much more interesting than the NBA one given that on average the Euroleague plays seriously, is that the numbers don’t add up to almost any club. Without external contributions, more or less interested patronage, handouts from the football section of the sports clubs, high-level European basketball should shrink by at least half.
