Monday, April 30, 2012

Rise of Russia as the European Basketball Power


At the moment, Russian men’s basketball is ranked as a team sport # 3 in popularity, after soccer and ice hockey. Russian National basketball team won gold medals at European Basketball Championship in 2007, bronze medals in 1997 and 2011. They also won silver medals at World Basketball Championship in 1998. As a part of the Soviet Union team, Russian athletes won men’s basketball Olympic tournament twice (1972 and 1988).
Professional basketball club system is huge. The major league of Russian basketball is called PBL, which means Professional Basketball League. Currently, 10 teams are participating in it. Because all 10 teams also participate in different European competitions. PBL regular season consists of 18 games for each team. 8 best teams then play in post-season playoffs. CSKA (Moscow) is the biggest team in the league. In last 20 seasons they won 18 titles.
 In my opinion this basketball nation is one of the biggest in Europe together with countries like Spain, Serbia, France and Lithuania. Last year their basketball federation announced the new project that has a goal to make Russia the biggest European basketball force in entire Europe.
They created "The Second Division of Russian Basketball"  called  “Super League”. This minor league currently consists of 9 teams. The Third Division of Russian Basketball is called MBL. It currently consists of 17 teams. 8 teams compete in South Conference, and 9 teams compete in North conference. Thus, in whole professional basketball in Russia there are 36 teams, which really is not too many.    

With all these lower leagues they can imporve their young afirmate their young players and save lots of money to invest in some other projects and think with this strategy they will be always one step ahead other European countries.
Curently Russia is  coordinating with all basketball clubs in inside the country. In the nearest future their International Department should cover the whole region as well-former Soviet Union from which they are getting lots of quality players to play for their best clubs. Also they will need to pay more attention on bringing American players in the last five years they Russian proffessionall teams spent over $150 million on bringing these payers and their teams won the Euroleague only once, so I think they should cut their budget for bringing these players and in stead of that they should focus on working with the young talents that they have a lot.
The biggest weakness is the small capacity of our gymnasium. If they want to achieve their goal of vecoming the best basketball nation in Europe they will need to invest more money in building brand new arenas because the demand for this sport is rising very quickly and people are hungry for being able to enjoy and support their favorite players live.
In my opinion if they really finish all these things that they promised they have a great chance not just to compete with European countries than also to compete with even some NBA teams that play every year the Summer league against the best European clubs. At the end enjoy in this video.
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