EA7 Emporio Armani Milan Head Coach and four time Euroleague winner, Ettore Messina speaks to Future Stars about the Paris Olympic games and his expectations for the upcoming season.
What is your assessment of the Olympic tournament so far?
Obviously, it is a very high quality tournament. Let’s not waste the time to discuss whether the gap between America and the rest of the world is closing. We had a lot of a very close and competitive games
The gap is certainly closing, the US was very close to not making the final. Some people think the gap is closing some others disagree with it. I personally think it is closing. Serbia should have won this game
At some point, it looked like Serbia was leading quite comfortably. Obviously, Steph Curry had a massive game. I also believe that when Kevin Durant and Lebron James started defending Serbian pick and rolls between Bogdanovic and Jokic it become much more effective. When Embid was on Jokic he had far more freedom. There is no doubt that Serbia pushed the US to the limit.
Will the USA win the final easier than the game against Serbia?
It wont be easy because France plays at home and will have a big push from the crowd. It will be a close game but not like against Serbia. I think the USA will be extremely focused for the final. They had a very tough experience from the semis and they won’t commit the same mistakes. I predict a relatively comfortable win for the US.
Going closer back to home. How do you see your team for the next season? You are changing quite a lot of players. Such important players like Johannes Voigtman, Kyle Hines, Billy Baron, Nicolo Meli are leaving the team. It looks like you have a quite a rebuilding process in your hands?
We had players like Billy whose season was affected so much by injuries, In some other cases the negotiations didn’t go how we expected. We are getting a group of players like Zach LeDay, David Mc Cormack and Josh Nebo. They are younger and I feel we can be more athletic with better offensive options. We can consolidate with this group for the next two or three seasons.
Speaking of a rebuilding process don’t you think that the pool of players which you can choose from is shrinking? The Euroleague is aging and has quite a narrow group of older players who circulate among the teams. There is very little of fresh blood and young talented players.
Absolutely. This a very serious issue. There is a small group of players, lets say there are Tier1 which is moving from club to club. We have very few players coming from the NBA. Next season we will have players like Nikola Jovic coming back but this is not sufficient. On top of that we will have 2 expansion teams in the NBA in the near future and Commissioner Silver is in conversation with FIBA about a potential new competition. The situation is very unstable with a lot of moving parts. We haven’t mention yet about NIL money which will have a great impact on the destination of young players. I don’t think that the situation will become any better without all parties sitting around the table trying to work out a sensible solution. Maybe 10 or 15 years ago it was possible to establish the Euroleague as a development competition for the NBA. Now this option doesn’t exist we have to start from square one.
What are your expectations for the upcoming season? How about repeating what Panathinaikos has done last season. Afteryears of struggling to make a play off can you win the whole thing?
Everybody would love to do it. It would be nice to do a surprise like that but I think this comparison goes too far. I think we need to build our own future starting from the first practice and first game and we will see where we end up. I think we had a very good campaign four years ago when we went to the Final Four. Actually, we were not very far from the final game. Obviously, we had a very good roster, but it was the first year of this group together. I hope that we will be able to repeat this with the current group. At this moment we need to focus on our job and go game by game and then we will see. We can’t also forget about the domestic league. We want to defend our title in Italy. What is positive is that we will have much longer than usual in the preseason. This will allow us to do a lot of work
