The 2-Man Weave

I did something I never thought I’d do today: watched a large portion of a Spanish League basketball game. Rudy Fernandez’s team is in the championship against some team with blue uniforms (if my Spanish comprehension skills serve me well), and I thought I’d take the opportunity to watch the man without the clever editing of the youtubes (link thanks to someone in the oregonlive.com Blazers’ forum–the second time I’ve found something valuable on a message board). It was an interesting experience, and here’s what I took from it.

General
1) Spanish basketball, not surprisingly, is similar to soccer: hairy arms flailing everywhere. One of the most interesting parts of the game to me was when a defender tried to flop to sell an illegal pick call, and injured himself taking the dive. Nice.

2) Defense is nowhere to be found overseas. Which is unfortunate, because it’s nowhere to be found here either.

3) Some of those guys are better athletes than I expected them to be. I’m not saying there was a lot of above-the-rim play, but they were very quick. Then again, that could have been the defense talking.

Rudy
1) He’s better than I thought he would be. He’s clearly the best player on the floor. In Spain. Which, if he’s going to be an NBA-caliber player, he’d better be.

2) Not always the best decision-maker, but he wasn’t terrible either. He had a couple Manu Ginobili patented jump-pass-to-no-one moments, but he also showed surprisingly good court vision. A lot of wrap-around passes to a cutter.

3) He would make a good point guard offensively. Along with his court vision, he handled the ball very comfortably at all times. He would, however, be a liability on defense against the west’s best guards. That may not be that important, though, with Oden there to bail him out. And really, after this year, who hasn’t been shown to be a liability against Chris Paul and Deron Williams?

4) He’s probably not that good. The defense really was bad (olé!), and the refs were visibly infatuated with Rudy and his beautiful curls. He sparked a 12-point comeback for his team with 3 minutes left almost entirely from the free-throw line. He was getting Kobe calls (really! Watch that clip–:52 seconds in is fun).

5) He dominates the ball, and seems to need it to be good. It also shouldn’t be ignored that on his team he needs him to dominate the ball to create for them. Either way, he’ll need to make an immediate adjustment to his on-court style to mesh with the Blazers as presently constituted. There was one particular play in which he saved the ball to a teammate, then ran to an open spot, got the ball back, and sunk the shot. It gave me some confidence that he’s got the smarts to be good off the ball. Then again, it was only one play. And even Shawn Bradley had highlights.

It was probably the last Spanish League game I’ll ever watch, but it was great to finally get to see the player that Kevin Pritchard is so excited about having here next year. I’m guardedly optimistic. As long as he keeps the turnovers down, he should earn some minutes on this team.