EUROLEAGUE - Players dreaming of Olympic glory on show at Final Four

ISTANBUL (Euroleague/Olympics) – The best clubs in Europe will meet at another star-studded Turkish Airlines Euroleague Final Four this weekend.

One certainty at the Sinan Erdem Arena is that players on the winning side will gain a huge psychological boost ahead of a very important summer of international basketball.

Defending champions Panathinaikos, Olympiacos, Barcelona and CSKA Moscow all have stars that will be with their respective national teams at the FIBA Olympic Qualifying Tournament (OQT) in Caracas, Venezuela, or the London Games.

Barcelona, who take on Olympiacos in Friday's second Semi-Final, boast the great Juan Carlos Navarro, someone who punched his ticket to the Olympics when leading Spain to their second straight EuroBasket gold medal in 2011.

Navarro, the tournament MVP in Lithuania last summer, is as big a basketball star who ever played in the Euroleague and is also among the best to play in the international game.

Olympiacos have Pero Antic, a sporting god in The Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) after captaining the side to a fourth-place finish at EuroBasket 2011.

CSKA Moscow boast Andrei Kirilenko, maybe the best all-round player in the Euroleague and a superstar known the world over.

Then there is the Greek sports icon Dimitris Diamantidis, a champion of the highest order with Panathinaikos.

The veteran point guard announced his retirement from international basketball in the Sinan Erdem Arena after the 2010 FIBA World Championship.

Could the venue be the place where the 32-year-old lets the world know that he wants to come back to the national side and help Greece make it to a third straight Olympics?

La Bomba

Navarro will make his fourth appearance at an Olympic Games this year with Spain, but he’s fully focused on Barcelona right now.

There are many things that make him special.

He is reliable, and spectacular.

What was it that his national team coach, Sergio Scariolo, said after Navarro’s game-winning, 35-point explosion against FYROM in the Semi-Finals of the EuroBasket in Lithuania last year?

"Navarro has certain nights where he is a masterpiece," he said.

"He is in a world of his own and it feels as though he is not from this planet.

"He is an artist of basketball in Europe."

Never were truer words spoken.

La Bomba kills opponents in a myriad of ways, hitting three-pointers or scoring on daring, graceful drives to the basket.

No matter how tall, fierce and experienced the opposing center is, Navarro’s famous runner - a teardrop shot that seems to always go in - is never blocked.

What makes him even more dangerous is the presence of his backcourt mate, Marcelo Huertas, the Brazilian playmaker who will make his first Olympic appearance this year.

Just as with his national team, Huertas never gets rattled.

A slick ball-handler, the point guard - who turns 29 on 28 May - is extremely quick and passes with precision.

He always gets the ball into the hands of his team's most lethal shooter.

Huertas loves playing with Navarro.

"Under pressure, Navarro never changes his mentality," Huertas said to FIBA.com.

"You get the ball to him and he's going to score.

“He can do amazing things.

"It's a privilege to play with him."

Joe Ingles of Australia is the other Olympic-bound player wearing a Barcelona uniform this weekend.

The athletic, 24-year-old shooting guard is completing his second season in Europe.

While not a protagonist for Barca, he is capable of making game-changing plays on both ends of the floor.

Ingles is a tremendous leaper and should have a prominent role with Australia this summer when they return to the Olympics.

He played in the Boomers' side that reached the Quarter-Finals of the Beijing Games.

Olympiacos

The Final Four team coached by Serbian great Dusan Ivkovic, Olympiacos, has four players that could make the trip to Caracas with Greece, one that hopes to do so with Lithuania and another who definitely will with FYROM.

The two-time Olympian Vassilis Spanoulis missed last year's EuroBasket with the Greeks because of an injury but he is fully fit and looking as good as ever from the shooting guard position.

Spanoulis, like Navarro, has played in the NBA but has cemented his reputation as a standout in Europe.

His numbers have dropped in the Euroleague this season as he has moved from one stage to the next.

In the Regular Season, the 1.93m dynamo averaged 19.8 points per contest but that dropped to 15.5 in the Top 16 and then, in the Quarter-Final series with Montepaschi Siena, it fell to 10.8.

In the contest that sealed the Reds' progression to the Final Four, though, he did have 19 points.

Spanoulis always looms as a potential game-winner for any side that he plays for.

Kostas Papanikolaou, 22, is a bone fide star of the future, one who helped the Greeks to a sixth-place finish at EuroBasket 2011.

Kostas Sloukas is another youngster with a promising future in the national team.

At 22, he has gained invaluable experience with Olympiacos under Ivkovic and has a good shot of making the Greece team for the second time in a row.

Another Greek national team possibility is Georgios Printezis, a rising star in 2008 when he played at the OQT in Athens and then travelled to the Beijing Games where he helped the Panagiotis Yannakis-coached squad to a fifth-place finish.

He played the following two summers for Greece but wasn't in last year's team.

Martynas Gecevicius had a valuable role with bronze-medal winning Lithuania at the 2010 FIBA World Championship but poor form led to his exclusion last summer.

The Reds guard should be in the reckoning for a spot in Kestutis Kemzura's team again this year.

Antic is in his first season with Olympiacos and has only averaged 7.4 points and 4.5 rebounds.

His value to a team can’t be measured with statistics, however.

He isn't afraid, for example, to do the dirty work and he is also important when it comes to controlling the tempo of games.

A 2.10m forward, he presents match-up problems due to his ability to knock down three-balls.

Antic does what he is asked to do, which is why he plays almost 19 minutes a game for the demanding Ivkovic.

CSKA v Panathinaikos

Two of the most dominant clubs in recent Euroleague history, CSKA Moscow and defending champions Panathinaikos, will square off in the first Euroleague Semi-Final on Friday afternoon.

CSKA fans will consider this a revenge mission because Panathinaikos defeated CSKA in the 2007 and 2009 Euroleague title games.

Many are picking the Russian giants to capture the title because of Kirilenko, who has returned to the club after a decade in the NBA.

Kirilenko is one of the most important figures in Russian basketball history, a EuroBasket 2007 MVP and former FIBA Europe Player of the Year.

He joined Navarro on the All-Tournament Team at EuroBasket 2011.

AK47 is his nickname, and he does shoot down opponents in a variety of ways.

The 2.06m forward, now 31, has averaged 14 points, 7.2 rebounds, 2.6 assists, 1.5 steals and 1.9 blocks in the Euroleague.

Winner of the Best Defender award this season, Kirilenko is maybe the brightest of the stars that will be in Caracas for the OQT.

CSKA also boast the exquisite talent that is 1.95m shooting guard Alexey Shved, a player who emerged as a key man in the Russian national team set-up under coach David Blatt last year in Lithuania.

The athletic Shved has averaged 10.7 points and 3.2 assists for CSKA.

They also have Russia national team players Sasha Kaun, a towering center, guards Anton Ponkrashov and Eugeny Voronov as well as forwards Viktor Khryapa and Andrey Vorontsevich.

Lithuania’s veteran Darjus Lavrinovic is on the books of CSKA and could travel to Caracas and so could New York-born Sammy Mejia, who has Dominican Republic nationality but has yet to suit up for the country in international competition.

For Panathinaikos, Diamantidis means everything.

One of the most successful players ever in Greece, Diamantidis retired from the national team in the summer of 2010 but has heard repeated calls for his return ever since.

Though he was beaten to the Best Defender trophy by Kirilenko, the reigning Final Four MVP remains one of the top players in the competition and could yet again be the player to spirit his team to victory.

It remains to be seen if Diamantidis will reconsider his international retirement and join the national team in Caracas, although the temptation of making a third straight Olympic appearance may be too much to pass up.

Greece national team boss Ilias Zouros will also be paying close attention to Panathinaikos players Nick Calathes, Kostas Kaimakoglou, Ian Vougioukas and Stratos Perperoglou, to see how they performance in a pressure-cooker atmosphere, while center Aleks Maric is a potential member of Australia’s team.

Maric has not been a dominant force at Panathinaikos the past two seasons, as he had been with former club Partizan Belgrade.

His place in the Boomers’ squad is anything but secure since Australia coach Brett Brown has so many options in the low post.

Last but certainly not least when it comes to possible OQT-bound players wearing the Greens jersey is Sarunas Jasikevicius of Lithuania.

A veteran that captured the honor of EuroBasket 2003 MVP after leading the Baltic side past Spain in the title game, Jasikevicius has also enjoyed a lot of fine moments as an Olympian, too.

He nearly let Lithuania to an upset of the United States at the 2000 Sydney Games and four years later, did fire the Baltic country past the Americans in the Preliminary Round.

After a disappointing EuroBasket 2011, Jasikevicius, who is 36, has played an important role for Pana this season.

While he is undecided if he wants to play this summer for Lithuania, and it’s also unclear if Kemzura would like to select him.

FIBA