We have finished the first round of official matches convincingly, winning all the six qualifying games for the Euroleague, a good balance considering that the level of the opponents was good and that in almost all the games we managed to get very close to the level of play that we are aiming at reaching for all the 40 minutes of every game.

There is still much work to do on the chemistry, we still need a lot of time to perfectly understand how each player can be useful to the team, to understand our system of play in detail and also to begin customizing the systems and adapting them to this season’s players. Nevertheless, we have seen a lot of competitiveness and good attitude in all players: in the last six games all 12 players have been on the court, despite the fact that more than one match had a very close score.

Tuesday we will start the PBL (Professional Basketball League), the Russian league, with the toughest and longest trip of the championship: to Krasnoyarsk

It is a renewed League (hopefully), in philosophy, in transparency, in the ethic of its purpose: we are all very curious to see if this new breath of fresh air will also help the referees to shake off years of external pressure and influence, and start from scratch too.

The Regular Season will consist of three legs. The first and the second leg will take place on a home-and-away basis, while in the third round every team will play a game against each one of the others and the home factor will be determined by a draw.

The first eight teams will play the playoffs: quarterfinals will be played in the best-of-3 format, while semi-finals and finals will be in the best-of-five format.

The feeling that we all have is that the average technical level of the league has grown a great deal, not only CSKA that was reinforced by Smodiš’ comeback and the signing of Jamont Gordon, Marjanovic and Bykov, but also other teams like Krasnye Krylya, Kuban Lokomotiv, Spartak St. Petersburg seem much better equipped than last year, while UNICS Kazan is maintaining the already good roster plus adding our ex, Kelly McCarty.

Immediately after, on Sunday, we will play in Kaunas a tough VTB United League game against Zalgiris, a team that I saw playing very, very well in the Gomelski tournament in Moscow, where they beat Panathinaikos and lost by very little against CSKA. They have a new coach, Aco Petrovic, and a very deep roster, experienced and talented.

After that it will already be time for diving into the Euroleague’s atmosphere against Prokom, a team that reached Euroleague’s playoffs last year thanks to an extraordinary ability to take advantage of the nuances of the calendar of the top 16, despite losing in Khimki with a wide gap.