Tremendous effort by Ukraine to battle from behind and steal a 58-57 win over Belgium in our EuroBasket 2013 opener. We trailed for most of the game, but seized the lead when it counted most. With just seconds remaining in regulation, Pooh Jeter drove into the paint, sank a floater, drew the foul and hit his free throw to give Ukraine a 1-point lead for the win.
Thanks to our press officer Grygorij Palij for sharing some photos from FIBA’s official EuroBasket 2013 site.
The FIBA EuroBasket 2013 tips off in Slovenia on Wednesday, September 4. The 24 countries competing for the championship title have been broken down into four groups of six teams.
Ukraine is in Group A, which includes France, Israel, Belgium, Great Britain, and Germany. Led by 3X NBA champion Tony Parker, France is the favorite to win our group and will be a top contender for the title as they look to take home their first gold medal.
The preliminary stage of EuroBasket competition is a round-robin in which we will play every team in our group once for a total of 5 games in 6 nights. For Group A the first round will take place in Ljubljana, Slovenia. It will be a tremendous test for our young squad.
Only the top 3 teams from each group will advance to the second stage. Unfortunately, last year’s captain Artur Drozdov will not be able to compete with us in the tournament due to medical reasons. This is a big loss for Ukraine. We will sorely miss his veteran leadership and athleticism.
Ukraine will open up against Belgium on Wednesday evening. Belgium is a veteran squad whose average age is 29, so they have a lot of experience playing internationally. And they have a number of bigs who can shoot the ball well. On Thursday Ukraine will face Israel’s historically strong squad in Game 2, followed by Germany on Friday before everybody gets a day off to rest on day 4.
Our team has worked very hard this summer to prepare for EuroBasket 2013, and we look forward to the exciting opportunity to compete on the world stage. Belgium vs. Ukraine tips off at Tivoli Hall at 5:45 PM, which is 11:45 AM EST. Watch us live online on SportLemon.tv and cheer us to our first win of the tourney!
We travel to Sweden this week for exhibition games against Sweden and Poland before heading to Russia.
Though we went 0-3 in last week’s exhibition tournament in Serbia, we accomplished our goal of playing tough opponents. Nobody likes to lose, but hopefully the experience of competing against three upper echelon teams will help us grow. We travel to Poland at the end of this week to take on Poland and Sweden, so we’ll get another chance to test our chops before heading to EuroBasket 2013.
After a week of practices in Kiev we traveled to Serbia last night and will compete in a four-team exhibition tournament this weekend. We’ll face Montenegro in Game 1 and Serbia in Game 2. Game 3 will be winners vs. winners and losers vs. losers. Serbia, Montenegro, and Slovenia are all outstanding teams, so this will be an important test for us as we’ve mostly been scrimmaging against ourselves. We’ve only played two exhibition games so far, and we were missing 6 players who joined us late this summer. So we don’t know who we are yet. With less than a month to go until EuroBasket 2013, I look forward to seeing what we can do in this tourney and getting a handle on our strengths and weaknesses as we hone our identity.
