Finals: Bulgarian style


Finals: Bulgarian style
Chavdar Kostov (Photo:FIBA)
29-05-2007 12:34

Despite the obvious improvement, the Final series in Men and Women playoffs proved that Bulgaria is still country of basketball paradoxes.
During the last few years our country suffered from lack of coaching system to teach young players and most of the stars succeed to get away from mediocre zone not because but despite the coaching help.
The level of play in our men’s league is going up but not because of the local players. Some of the clubs have bigger budgets, which allows them to get decent and very expensive foreign players. Usually our young talents are well benched while the same age players in Europe are developing and most of them are candidates for NBA Draft.
Some of the Bulgarian players are going abroad but more often talents like Nikolay Varbanov and Chavdar Kostov lose the momentum and get to the point where the only thing that’s left are the comments like “How good he could have been”.
We’ve heard all these words for Marto Kuzov, Krasi Shuranov, Lubo Amiorkov, Niki Dakov, Bobi Hadjirusev and many more, players that all reached only local level.
If we try to find the reason why all this happens, we can spend years in this new version of BulgarianBasket.com. However, I’m trying to bring up conversation about the real things in our basketball. That is why I started with paradoxes – simply because they are around us in every single minute.
The biggest joke is that in the days where center forwards are the most expensive players and one of the main positions in every coach’s rotation, in both Final series, Men and Women, we saw only one typical player on position 5, the “too soft” Trevor Harvey.
Lukoil Academic became champions again without even playing Mate Skelin and suffering from “coaching injury” Boyko Mladenov. Same thing happened in Women’s Final, Radostina Slavova was the only 5 despite she will feel way more comfortable as 4.
This is really strange for a country that gave such a legends as Iliya Mirchev, Viktor Radev, Atanas Golomeev and Georgi Gloushkov, Vanya Voynova, Nitsa Borisova, Penka Stoyanova and Madlena Staneva…
It’s strange, but it’s a fact. And a serious problem, because during the last few years our basketball is finding quality mainly at positions 2 and 3 and have no success to produce not only a realplaymaker, but a good center, who can dominate and be a leader of the team.
I hope Nikolay Varbanov will not be wasted as the trend there is not up.
I know it’s much easier to write good words and then everybody likes you. However the reality is different, I prefer to hear something like: “Cedar-a is acting like a wise guy”, rather than see happy faces.
It’s just that we, the people who love basketball, have greater ambitions and desires, than we could manage with our real abilities. Let’s just admit it, and keep going…

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