Basketball
The Murcian team, with a deep squad to combine the League and the Champions League, starts the season tonight at the Palace against the dangerous Breogán
The wait is over. Only ten days after the end of the Eurobasket, the Endesa League got under way yesterday with the only early game of the first day, Girona – Real Madrid, which brought the legendary Marc Gasol back to the competition, and continues with the rest of the games , among which is tonight’s duel at 9:30 p.m. from UCAM against Breogán, one of his close enemies from last year in the fights for the Cup and the ‘playoff’, goals that both achieved and touched equally respectively.
This 2022-23 season is not just one more in the consolidation of the city of Murcia within the Endesa League map, a category from which it has not been lowered since it returned to it in 2012 and not a minor issue, as the relegations showed of the last campaign of very advanced projects, such as those of Burgos and Andorra. It is also the return of European nights to the Palace, the Champions League stadium four seasons later.
All the teams in the Endesa League, which continues to be the toughest domestic league on the continent, already know how they are coping with the double competition. Ask Burgos and Andorrans if not. To meet the challenge without having to lower the bar on the objectives, which Sito Alonso yesterday marked to the media at a joint breakfast as “being a league champion” (establishing the parallelism with the typical parental message of “studying to get a 10, because if you do it to get a 5 you don’t pass”), Alejandro Gómez has sought to improve his team’s wardrobe, renewed with up to eight new faces.
“This year we are going to see different things, but the philosophy does not change,” announces Sito Alonso, UCAM coach
But not only because of the names, but because of its structure, a different UCAM is expected. The coach himself recognized it, already in a more formal tone, in the last press conference before the first official match. “We are going to see different things, but the philosophy does not change.” And it is that UCAM does not have two offensive talents as capable of executing at the level of Isaiah Taylor or James Webb III, but they do have more weight in all positions. Or, perhaps, point guard Travis Trice, one of the names of the preseason, wants to show that he is still that type of player. But, for now, he is not so brazen that he is going to be like that.
It is the great step forward in his career, not so much for a James Anderson who has just won the Euroleague for the last two years, but he does face the challenge of having a lot of ball in his hands again in his debut in the Endesa League, and in a position in which the executor was not as protagonist as in the UCAM in recent years. In the ‘4’, where the charismatic Webb III is gone, Radovic and his game with his back to the rim gain in importance, and the significant changes continue in the ‘5’, where the towering Pustovyi, Diop and Sakho give a different style. to the Lima-Cate duo. Only in ‘2’, with Davis and McFadden, life goes on the same.
The penalty against Rojas
Sadiel Rojas’ incident with AJ Slaughter in the second round match against Gran Canaria was a small before and after in the UCAM season. The Murcian team was once again put in the eye of the hurricane many days after having been there, with almost consecutive incidents in Lugo, Andorra and Badalona, and the team was very touched in a final stretch to forget. Salt in the wound, the sanction against Sadiel Rojas for the first two Endesa League games this coming season.
The university team plays on Saturday in Zaragoza and on Tuesday they debut in the Champions League, at home against Tofas
First in a more informal tone at Alejandro Gómez and Sito Alonso’s breakfast before the media, and then in a more corporate one at the press conference, it was one of the most controversial issues. “I find it difficult to understand that a player cannot play due to an unsportsmanlike foul, affirmed and reaffirmed by the referees, it is the first time that it happens,” said Sito, referring to the ex officio entry of the single competition judge for a signaling of the that there is in almost every record, and of which the referees did not raise its seriousness. “It is important that we forget these things, we assume them and dedicate ourselves to playing, the coach resigned himself”.
Europe, in just five days
UCAM makes its debut today hosting Breogán and, already on Tuesday, opens a new competition, the Champions League, against the Turkish Tofas, again at the Palace. But it is that, in between, he will have already gone and returned from playing a new game in Zaragoza this Saturday. After two weeks without competing in the preseason with more absences than he remembers, UCAM opens the course with three games in five days.
On Tuesday, Sito’s men return to the Champions League, a competition in which they have not participated since the coach arrived in Murcia in the 2018-19 season and which, so that it does not become an uphill climb, he analyzes as fundamental “understanding it with the same intensity than the ACB”. With his fifth season in Murcia, Sito Alonso not only makes UCAM the team with which he has played the most seasons in the Endesa League. He is also the fifth coach who has spent the most years in a row with the same team, only behind the unique case of Moncho Fernández at Obradoiro (thirteen seasons) and Txus Vidorreta (Tenerife), Pedro Martínez (Manresa) and Carles Duran (Joventut ), who also assume their fifth campaign in their teams.
#UCAM #starts #games #days