Author: Manuel Schust

The Wiha Panthers Schwenningen continue their success story in the Pro B

After eight games the Wiha Panthers Schwenningen and the Fraport Skyliners Juniors may have had an identical 6-2 record in this year’s Pro B competition. But apart from the record Schwenningen and Frankfurt don’t have much in common. While Frankfurt has a roster full of german talents and primilary uses the Pro B as a platform to develop players for their first division team, Schwenningen mainly counts on experienced players and tries to establish basketball in the Black Forest. On Gameday 8 Schwenningen hosted Frankfurt at the Deutenberghalle and 850 spectators witnessed a commanding 68-48 start-finish victory of the home team.

Clarence_Moore

Elijah Clarance (blue jersey #1) and Rasheed Moore (orange jersey #23) led their teams in scoring. Clarance scored a team-high 15 points and Moore dominated with 31.

In Schwenningen the fans are used to see their team winning. Since 2015 the club has won the vast majority of its home games and established a growing fan basis. After winning the Regionalliga title in 2016/17 the Wiha Panthers became one of the main talking points in german basketball. The club was not happy about the foreigner rules in Germany’s third-tier level league and threatened to initiate legal actions. In Pro B competition at least three german or so called local players have to be on the court at anytime. Schwenningen did not want to part ways with some of their european top performers and declared that the practiced rules may not be in accordance with european regulations. A process that could have dramatically changed the foreigner rules in german basketball ended abruptly before it even started. Due to a procedural error in their application documents the Wiha Panthers could not make the jump from the Regionalliga to the Pro B. Schwenningen’s head coach Alen Velčić still believes the decision of the Zweite Basketball-Bundesliga was mainly politically motivated to keep his club out of the competition. But Schwenningen did what they do best, competed for another year in the Regionalliga Südwest and could again win the championship with just one loss in 28 games. This time the club declared to play by the rules and accepted the existing foreigner regulations.

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Eurobasket Lifetime Achievement for Miles Schmidt-Scheuber

If you want the latest player signings, imformative interview, in depth player portrait or in detail post game report in German basketball, then you will almost always find something from Miles Schmidt-Scheuber daily on our website. He joined Eurobasket in 2008 and is now going into his 11th season reporting about German basketball for eurobasket.com

The American/German who grew up in Boston following the Boston Celtics as a kid and hanging around 2 time NBA champion Dave Cowens who was his neighbor did his first basketball reports in 2003 for American Forces Network in english in Frankfurt Germany covering the Opel Skyliners. Soon he started doing play by play of the Skyliners on webradio. He also was the first person to have a weekly basketball show on German radio in 2006 at a time where social media was nonexistent. He also called 7 BBL allstar games and did games of the German national team. He has been doing live stream of basketball games from various leagues since 2012 covering youth games up to the professional level

His 15 year basketball reporting career has resulted in 500 plus games called and 1000 plus interviews conducted. Some of his interviews over the years were with players like Chris Williams, Shammond Williams, Casey Jacobson, Jon Leuer and Tyler Honeycutt to name just a few. He also is the first multi-lingual basketball commentator in Germany as he did play by play for the Fraport Skyliners Eurochallenge season and 2015-2016 Fiba Europe Cup season where they won the title. He also did play by play of the 2017 and 2018 German youth U-16 and U-19 championships in German and english. Currently besides his daily Eurobasket reports he is working on putting the finishing touches on his first book describing his life in the German basketball world.

We are extremely happy to have Miles in our team. Ten years past, the best is yet to come!

Courtesy of Eurobasket.com

Bayern Munich dominates Alba Berlin in game 5 to win the BBL 2018 championship

Soccer fans will never know how amazing it is to witness a do-or-die game in a playoff series. After a long season the EuroCup teams FC Bayern Munich and Alba Berlin faced each other in this year’s BBL Playoff finals and demonstrated in five tough games how beautiful basketball and playoff competition is. After Berlin managed to steal game 1 in an overtime game, Bayern could win a one-sided game two and take a 2-1 lead with a 72-66 win. But Alba Berlin striked back and defeated Bayern in their last home game 72-68. So both teams would meet one final time in Munich’s Audi Dome to crown a new BBL champion. The odds were clearly against Berlin: Since 1998 there had been six decisive game 5 battles in the BBL finals and it was always the team with homecourt advantage that was victorious. Another interesting point is that Bayern Munich could win every playoff series against Alba Berlin in the past. But Berlin fans could also come up with some numbers that kept their hopes alive. Luke Sikma could win the spanish ACB finals on June 16th last year. That is the exact date of game 5 this year. If one looked at the record of all Bayern vs. Alba games this season, it became obvious, that every team had back-to-back victories. If this streak would continue Alba Berlin should win game 5 after winning game 4. And since the second half of game 3 Alba Berlin’s head coach Alejandro Garcia Reneses found a way to limit Bayern’s offensive flow. Still Bayern Munich always played their best basketball when they were with their back to the wall. And game 5 of the 2018 BBL finals should be no exception. Bayern was again able to step up defensively and steam rolled over Alba Berlin to take win the 2018 BBL championship with a 106-85 victory.

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Listen to German Hoops!

Sick and tired of reading long, detailed reports about german basketball? We got something for you! Soon you will be able to just sit down, relax and listen to the German Hoops Talk. Manuel Schust and Miles Schmidt-Scheuber decided to start one of the first podcasts that covers german basketball in english. Later this week episode #1 will be released. We will talk about the upcoming BBL Play-Offs. In the meantime, BBL topscorer Phil Scrubb says Hi!

 

 

Throwback Interview with Ilian Evtimov

Technology is moving fast. It may be just a couple of years ago, but there was a time when Basketball Bundesliga games could not be watched online. Streaming games live was too expensive or technically not possible. Nowadays all you have to do to watch every Basketball Bundesliga game is to subscribe to Telekom Basketball, pay 10 Euros per month and enjoy every game live and re-live. But there was a time in the early years of this millennium when basketbal fans had to sit in front of their computers and watch the live score reload every thirty seconds. The alternative for that was listening to radio broadcasts. In Germany Miles Schmidt-Scheuber was one of the first pioneers, who drove around Germany and broadcasted games live via webradio. He is still around and last year broadcasted his 500th game. From 2006 until 2013 he was host of the first ever weekly Basketball show on German radio. The two hour show featured game analysis and interviews with basketball players. In February 2009 he had a special show with former Frankfurt Skyliners player Ilian Evtimov. The bulgarian-french basketball player came to the broadcasting center in Heusenstamm (small city close to Frankfurt/Hesse) and was interviewed for about an hour. German Hoops proudly presents the interview on Ilian’s 35th birthday:

Quo vadis Alba Berlin?

After firing Ahmed Caki Alba Berlin looked desperate and noone thought they could compete with powerhouse FC Bayern Munich in the quaterfinals of the BBL Playoffs. But after a devestating loss in game 1 (95:68) Alba bounced back and made Bayern work extremely hard to reach the semifinals. Even though Alba Berlin ultimately lost 3-1 to Munich, the team somehow managed to win back the hearts of their supporters and earn the respect of the whole german basketball community.

Interim coach Thomas Päch, who took over after Caki was fired, brought back the spirit and passion the team lacked for most of the season. Alba’s twitter hashtag #mitleibundseele (transl.: with body and soul) finally made sense for the first time this season. One has to wonder why it took so long for the players to break free and play with the kind of energy and effort they showed against Munich. Was it all Caki’s fault that Alba struggled after a 7-game winning streak in December and never fully recovered throughout the season? First of all one has to mention that Ahmed Caki seemed very unfortunate as the team had to handle so many injuries over the course of the season. Just remember: Brandon Ashley, who should have been a keyplayer on Alba’s frontcourt, decided to leave the club before the season even started. Malcolm Miller broke his hand at the end of the preparation and missed the first nine games of the season. That’s two starters out before the season even started. When the team finally seemed to have found their rhythm Peyton Siva, with whom Alba had a 14-5 record, had to deal with a stubborn adductor injury that made him miss most of the second half of the season. Without Siva the team finished the BBL regular season with a miserable 4-9 record. Then just days before the start of the Playoffs Alba’s most important offensive player Dragan Milosavljević suffered a season-ending injury to his elbow. But bad luck aside, retrospectively hiring Caki seems like a big misunderstanding.

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Dirk Bauermann returns to the BBL

After I finished reading “Teamplayer”, a biography about legendary american head-coach Pat Elzie, I was looking for some new basketball-related books. Unfortunately there are just a handful of german basketball biographies available and I thought that I already had read all of them. But when I scrolled through some related books on amazon I found something I had missed: Dirk Bauermann “Mission Erfolg. Meine Vision, mein Plan, mein Weg” [engl. translation: Dirk Bauermann ‘Mission success. My vision, my plan, my way].
Somewhere in the back of my mind I was aware of the fact that Bauermann had released a book, but I was never that interested in reading it. I saw excerpts of the text and simply felt that it was probably written on advice from a public relations office.
Published in 2012, it is still available on hardcover for 20 Euros. Obviously the book did not sell very well as it never even made it to a paperback version. And at first glance, one may wonder why. Dirk Bauermann is the most successful and most famous German basketball coach. I would even say that when it comes to basketball personalities recognized by the average sports fan in Germany he is right behind Dirk Nowitzki and Dennis Schröder. Nine BBL-championships and seven cup-titles with Leverkusen and Bamberg are on his résumé and at the EuroBasket 2005, he led Germany to an unforgettable and  sensational silver medal. But Bauermann’s reputation suffered a lot after his last successful run with Bamberg. He could not fulfill the high expectations of Bayern Munich and was fired by the club in September 2012 – just seven months after the release of the book.
Ever since Bauermann has worked in different places (Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Iran), but never found a new home and was not really successful. Somehow the former head-coach of the German national team was off the radar. Whenever a BBL-club was looking for a new head-coach and some names came up, it seemed like no one was thinking about him. The way his teams had played in the past and his whole coaching philosphy did not seem well suited for the modern BBL basketball. Whatever he was doing in the middle-east as head-coach of the Iranian national team, no one seemed to miss him around the league.
The publisher of his book must have thought the same as there is a really cheap e-book version for just 1,49 €. Of course I had to give it a try.

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