Euro-excellence!

PARIS (The Monday International Show) - The upcoming Euro championship should produce alot more suspense and excitement compared to the African or Americas tournaments where Angola and the USA are light years ahead of the competition.

A Euro championship is more dense and competitive from top to bottom than an Olympic or World championship tournament and the distribution of only two tickets for Bejing will turn the intensity up to an even higher notch!

The necessity of a pre-Olympic tournament next summer is debateable, but those are the rules for now and everyone must go along accordingly.

In Spain,during the first round each win is important, either to qualify for the second round for the weaker teams or to salt away victories for the stronger teams in view of the quarter-finals.

All indicators point towards a repeat of last summer's Saitama final even though Spain will probably have to overcome the absence of Garbajosa and Greece the absence of Fotsis who recently broke his finger(just like Tony Parker before Japan).

Those two are key players but the depth of those two countries' benches is amazing!

France,Italy or Lithuania seem most apt to take Bronze and the second Bejing ticket if Spain is in the final.

A remake of France's meltdown in the third place game vs. Italy in Stockhom in 2003 seems improbable to me after France was the third best European nation in the last two major competitions along with the shared experience that the Parker-Diaw generation has accumulated in the last four years on the French national team and even before that as Euro junior champs back in 2000!

On the other hand, I don't see France blowing out their opponent in the bronze-medal game either,like they did vs.

A Gasol-less Spain in Belgrade two summers ago!

From the quarters on, with the elimination game system, we should see some of the most exciting basketball possible, bar none!

I see Spain finally winning a Euro championship,because they have a wonderful generation of unselfish,experienced, all-around type players and they are playing at home in a country that loves and supports the sport of basketball.

Besides that, they just seem to have Greece's number the same way Greece has always had ...France's number!

The success of talented young teams like Russia,Serbia,Slovenia and Turkey will undoubtedly boil down to their mental toughness quotient in the money time!

An interesting sidelight to the competition will be to see if FIBA heeds the French federation president's call to share revenues in the future to help pay the sky-rocketing cost of insurance for certain NBA stars like Boris Diaw who increase the attractiveness of FIBA events for worldwide media outlets who pay the rights fees!

In any case, I leave for Alicante in a few days to cover the Euro for French TV with an enormous smile on my face knowing we'll have great weather and fabulous games to see in a basketball loving nation that I'VE always loved for many reasons(the people,culture,food, architecture,beaches,joie de vivre etc.etc.)