Mirror match

Today's the day. It's the Euroleague final, Panathinaikos Vs. CSKA Moscow. Dimitris Diamantidis Vs Thodoris Papaloukas. The three-times Defensive Player of the Year against the two times Euroleague MVP. Arguably the two best European players currently playing in Europe, still. But what's more interesting is that they're both the same type of player, hence the title of my post.

They're both point guards, tall, athletic (for Europeans anyway), fast, and with long hands, which make them excellent for stealing passes and contesting shots. It's thanks to their skills that the Greek national basketball team became a force to be reckoned with again. The only slight difference between them is the fact that Diamantidis is better at taking three-pointers, while Papaloukas is better at scoring inside the paint. The battle between the two should be very exciting tonight.

But what's more important is something that can't be shown with statistics. Just by being on the court, they make their teams better, more coherent. Even if they don't score points, steal the ball or make assists. I'm not sure how or why they do this, but it happens.

All in all, I hope the game tonight will be fun, and nothing like the borefests of Friday. Euroleague basketball isn't as flashy as NBA basketball (even though the recent Rockets-Jazz series was bad enough to almost make me change my mind on that), but there have been some really great games over the years.

Speaking of the NBA and the Rockets, how bad must it be for a team when the coach doesn't trust more than 7 players? Seriously, how can anyone expect the same 7 people to just go through an entire full season and still have stamina left for the playoffs? Yes, I'm sorta bitter because Van Gundy didn't give V-Span enough time this year, but JVG was doing the same to most of his bench players. I don't get it.

Oh well, Warriors-Jazz should be interesting. I wonder if the Warriors have it in them to go all the way to the Western Conference finals. I'll be rooting for them in that series, a Jazz-Spurs WCF series sounds a bit too much like the Euroleague semis for my taste.

Enough blabbing, ΈΛΑ ΜΩΡΗ ΠΑΝΑΘΑ!