Game of the Year....so far!

A lot of basketball and a lot of winning since my last post. But no game has been easy, quite exciting actually. Our Euroleague game against a team from France looked scary towards the end. We were down 2 with just a few seconds left when one of our guards made a steal and laid it in. We won that game by 7 in overtime. Our next Euroleague game in Italy was just as close. We started the 4th quarter down 8 points, but intensified our defense and went up by 2 points with a few seconds left. Our last defensive set we got a steal and an "and one" and won that game by 5. Our Euroleague pool is the toughest of all Euroleague pools so to get a win on the road is really huge for us.

And finally we played our biggest rival, Galatasaray yesterday. I'm still coming into grasps with what this rivalry really entails. Stanford and Cal really have nothing on this! You might remember we lost to them in our first game of the year for the President's Cup and we ran into some fan confrontations. It was very mild compared to yesterday. First of all, no Fenerbahce fans are allowed to come into the gym because too many fights would break out. Hundreds of policemen and women still come to the game for security. These fans hate Fenerbahce beyond anything I can tell you. Ironically, I thought the atmosphere was really fun except for a few scary moments. A glass bottle was actually thrown at us and shattered at our bench. Coins and water bottles were thrown. A game usually lasts and hour and a half but because of constant crowd control and cleaning the wet floor from broken water bottles it lasted well over 2 hours. And if you really want to make them mad then beat their team!! We played really well and really inspired and won by 8 points. So of course as soon the final buzzer sounded we were hurried off the court into our locker room where we could celebrate.

We are off to Lithuania on Tuesday to start the second of the the Euroleague pool play. And then I will return to Istanbul and to my mom who will be visiting me! My brother will come 2 days after so I'm definitely looking forward to to having almost the whole family here with me for about a week.

Happy election day!

As much as this election has been hyped it feels like a holiday today! It is quite a historical election however, so very deserving. People here in Istanbul are aware of the election too. From the teammates, coaches, and friends I have talked to they seem to want Obama.

So we've had a few games since the last post. In Slovakia, we lost the game by 8 just in the last couple minutes. We came back to tie in the 4th quarter and then let them bust a couple of threes. That was a hard one as we definitely should have won. Euro league is tough on the road though, especially in Russia where we played the winner of the league for the past two seasons. To say this team is good would be such an understatement. They have an all-world team and it's not a good idea to get off to a bad start against a team like that. I'm too embarrassed to say how much we lost by so if you want the score you can look it up online:) We came back to win 2 Turkish league games, however. Our first one was against my former team, Botas. They have 4 or 5 of the same players so it was good to see them, but we handled our business and beat them by 20. Our last game was in Mersin against my former coach who switched teams from last year. He is also my national team coach and having played for him for a year I knew that his team would be scrappy and would play hard and smart. It was a close game and came down to the wire but thanks to a key defensive rebound and a couple of free throws we pulled it out and won by 5 points.

It's back to Euroleague play tomorrow. We will play a team from France here in Istanbul. They have yet to win in our pool, but every team is good so we will still have to play tough.