ESPN's John Hollinger comments on Ginobili, Javtokas, and Oberto's Olympic play.

[Booharv]

http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/summer08/basketball/columns/story?columnist=hollinger_john&page=OlympicWrap-080825

There's a small section on Javtokas which is fairly interesting.

[Bartleby]

Interesting, but the most salient point to me was this part:

"He didn't play big minutes due to fouls"

(That said, I wouldn't mind seeing him in silver and black).

[Obstructed_View]

Interesting, but the most salient point to me was this part:

"He didn't play big minutes due to fouls"

(That said, I wouldn't mind seeing him in silver and black).

Some guys who suffer from foul trouble in international play do well in the Spurs system. Well, one.

[Ocotillo]

I wish we could get this guy over here as a back up. Oberto's performance in the Olympics is concerning. I hope he doesn't slip even more this year.

[beirmeistr]

Hollinger appears to be incorrect on Ginobili's injury. He implies that the injury happened because back in 2002, he injured his ankle.
But there is another thread in Spurstalk which has articles showing that the injured ankle in 2002 was the right one. The current bad ankle is his left ankle.

[AnotherArgie]

Hollinger appears to be incorrect on Ginobili's injury. He implies that the injury happened because back in 2002, he injured his ankle.
But there is another thread in Spurstalk which has articles showing that the injured ankle in 2002 was the right one. The current bad ankle is his left ankle.

Not only that, Manu played like 2 or 3 minutes in the final game in 2002, and I think he didn t even shoot. The coach tried to open the yugoslavian defense for at least a couple of posessions. Hollinger makes it sound like Manu played for 35 minutes or something.

[milkyway21]

Robertas Javtokas
Here's a story somebody ought to cover: How Lithuania is at all competitive in basketball. Lithuania has only 3.6 million people, or slightly less than the population of Oregon. It's about 1/80th the size of the U.S. and 1/11th as big as Spain or Argentina.

And though it didn't win a medal in Beijing, it reached the semifinals once again -- something it's done in all five Olympic tournaments since independence. And before that, the country essentially won a gold medal in 1988 (all but one key player on the Soviet team was Lithuanian).

Lithuania made the semis in Beijing even though two of its three NBA players sat out (Zydrunas Ilgauskas and Darius Songaila) and one of its top European stars, sharpshooter Arvydas Macijauskas, was also unavailable.

Yet this tiny country went nine deep all tournament long, had five guys hit better than 40 percent on 3-pointers, and kept pulling 6-11 guys off the bench to beat the tar out of bigs like Yao Ming and Pau Gasol.

Javtokas was part of that latter group, and showed why he'd be a competent backup center if the Spurs (who own his rights) can ever convince him to make the jump. He didn't play big minutes due to fouls but he got his licks in while he was out there, including a 15-point effort against Spain in the semis.

It's shocking for such a small country to send out such deep teams year after year; in particular, it seems demographically impossible to produce so much quality size. I have no idea how they do it.


yeah pretty ridiculous. China has a population of over 1 billion and they still have to win a medal in international competition:D(well, at least the Phils with just 28m+ population won a silver once in the Worlds, the highest so far in Asia), but Lithuania team is incredible. How they managed to come up of a very good team each tournament? Do they have another sport there or they only concentrate on recruiting basketball players? They pretty made a good impression almost beating KG/Zo's U.S. team in Australia, if not of that buzzer beater, the U.S. embarrassment and the awakening might have started with that team.