Cheer Up, Backfield, the Main Thing Is the Playoffs

The Sunday and Monday before last, the Northern European Basketball League (NEBL) drew thousands of this popular game’s aficionados to the magnificent Palace of Sports in Kyiv.

And they did not fail to come, for they were so eager to watch matches between Oleksandr Kovalenko’s young team in Kyiv and the grandees of European ba s ketball and favorites of the first NEBL official championship, Kaunas Zalgiris and Moscow’s TsSKA (Central Army Sport Club). Much pressure came down on the shoulders of Kyiv basketball general manager Vitaly Khomenko and Oleksandr Volkov Basketball Foundation executives, who exerted great effort to fill the Palace of Sports grandstands to capacity.

No matter how hard the fans cheered and the indefatigable high- voiced cheerleader tormented the microphone, calling upon the “backward” Kyivans to win, the latter lost to the aces of Zalgiris (80:108) and TsSKA (77:89). But these failures should not knock the Kyiv players off the path of victories (the Kyiv Basketball Club has already scored six of them and is quite able to score the seventh in the match versus the Skyliners from Frankfurt). It is no crime to know the subject worse than the teachers themselves do. And the Moscow and Kaunas players, so experienced in tournament battles, should of course be considered basketball professors. After all, they have something to learn from.

The Kyiv club, established last summer by the 1988 Seoul Olympic champion Oleksandr Volkov, has successfully fulfilled the first part of its task: to enter the list of the top ten teams, competing against 13 teams in the first stage of the tournament. The second part is more difficult: to clear the quarterfinal and semifinal playoff hurdles, which will allow the team to become one of the four contenders for the championship title and get prize money. Incidentally, the overall prize fund is $100,000.

The playoff games will start later in March, and before that time our boys will have to play matches versus the two Finnish clubs ToPo (Helsinki) and Honkoi (Espoo). Good luck, backs!