Basketball, women and money

BERLIN (The Thursday Ballin' Europe Break) - It is just Thursday and the week brought us so many interesting stories and news that I don't even know where to start. Well the best thing that could happen to us that we finally get some real action and the NBA EUROPE Lives, CBA Challenges and all these meaningless competitions are over. It has been a long time since the FIBA Eurobasket in Spain - well, at least I think so.

First of all I must tell you about this nice little project we launched for the Euroleague. We asked 24 of the best basketball journalists in Europe such as Eduardo Schell, Yarone Arbel, David Hein, Sven Simon and Federico Del Prete. Each of them wrote a little preview about the team of their country that participates in the Euroleague. To make this a little bit of a competition we asked all of them for their predictions, too. Oh - I almost forgot that they also have to participate in BallinEurope's private Euroleague fantasy challenge league. Now if you got a team, you are more than welcome to join/prove yourself, too - let's see who is a real expert! (name of the league: BallinEurope, password: kaponovic).

Talking about real experts: Do you know Jared Reiner? No? Jared is a former Chicago Bull and now Polaris Murcia (Spanish League) center who wrote his first blog entry for Draftexpress this week. He tells us about his experience with the Spanish siesta ( I always thought this is not just a Spanish but a Mediterranean area thing).

Just in case you are one of the people thinking that women's basketball isn't worth it to watch you might want to go to the Opening weekend of the french first division (LFB) in Paris this weekend. I promise you will at least like the posters that advertise the opening day. By the way, the Italian league had its opening weekend last weekend and Miss Italia did a little show in high heels with a basketball - anybody seen that?

Italy - the home of pizza, pasta and four Euroleague teams (Roma, Montepaschi, Bologna and some team from Milano that has still to find the right way). We also found out that playing in Italy for fun is not appreciated. You might want to read the comments on that since it looks like there is much more to come from Italy regarding rules in the next years.

So we talked about basketball, women and good food, isn't there something missing? Oh yeah - the money! I know that most of the fans still don't know how much cash you can make now as a basketball star in Europe. We found a nice list that tells you how much the top 10 European players make.

Let me know if you need something else then Basketball, women, food and money - we will take care of that next week..