Hoops

Tall Blacks - Brazil

I said it the minute Abercrombie pulled out but NZ had already made the commitment to the qualifying tournament.
Hopefully the team will gel and pull a miracle out of their asses lol

Jeff "the Maori" Green is painful, in saying that I didn't support spending $ on the only 12 players we could scrape together just for the sake of it.

Vucinic started Vukona at the 3 spot.

He ran with Tait, Allen, Vukona, Frank and Pledger.

Wonder if playing the swingman position took him out of his comfort (the post/the mid post/anywhere inside the key)

I don't usually support what Green does. He can come in with very extremist and often unnecessary comments.

But I think he makes a fair point here. $350,000 is a lot of money to spend on a tournament without top players.

But I do also find merits in the other side of things paul.

If they can get Angola, then play an absolute blinder and knock of Macedonia, then they will set up a QF against Dominican Republic (who are very very good team with Cali as coach and Horford, Sosa and Garcia)

But hopefully we can play with such a unique style (up and down), that will throw teams out of sync.

So there you go paul, I like Greens argument, but I do acknowledge there are points on the other side.

What really angers me is that, in stark contrast to Australia, internationally, nothing is done for players who are 19+.

Whereas, Australian 19 y.o+ who come back to Aus for summer have tours, tournaments and games to play for in a developmental sense.

So embarrassing as a NZer.

What's worse is that Nene and Varejao played limited minutes, and they were without Leandro.

If this team wanted to, they could have won by 40 + tonight. Brazil were just cruising.

I really support Jeff Green's criticism of this team.
He reckoned that the TB's were better sending a team to China, hence saving some money and still developing the players (choosing younger guys).

But instead, the TB's and Vucinic in particular have not been realistic and biting off more than they can chew.
So they think it is smart to take our allocated annual funding and go out to spend it on something which yields little value (Guys like Kenney, Allen, Tait, Bartlett); not exactly the future of our program.

Cheers the TB's for wasting all of BBNZ's allocated SPARC funding.

Now the U19s, and other players who are 20-22, have no chance of attending development tours.

I love what the Breakers are doing. They now have more annual tours than BBNZ..They send a youth Breakers team to Melbourne every year and a 'Bench Breakers team/NZNBL' team to China.