Lebanon, Japan tune up vs European teams

(Editor’s note: The following is the fourth part of an article on Philippine basketball and the national team.)

The other Asian teams, however, had their own European tours. Lebanon, which also qualified in the now-defunct McDonalds International Tournament in 1998, lost to 25th-ranked Czech Republic and Latvia in a strong tournament in Pardubice, Czech Republic last June, according to eurobasket.com.

Lebanon lost both games by 18 points during the Pardubice tournament, which also featured 30th-ranked Poland and 70th-ranked Tunisia from Africa.

Japan had a series of games against teams from world no. 17 Germany’s Bundesliga last July - beating squads from Goettingen, Chemnitz, and Rhoendorf. It cannot be traced from Germany’s basketball websites how great Japan’s victims were.

Korea, however, did not have any exhibition match with European or Asian countries. Its national squad, which continued to feel the effects of its semifinal loss to Lebanon in the 2001 Asian Championships, was formed just early this August.

To look at how the two-time Australian National Basketball League (NBL) champion Melbourne Tigers were as a team, it is ranked only sixth with a 16-14 record during the 2001-2002 regular season. In the recent playoffs, however, it was the Adelaide 36ers that won the NBL title.

In other words, the Tigers, despite the presence of NBL All-First team awardees Bradtke, Gaze and Copeland, are not the strongest Australian cage squad in recent NBL editions. Not even these great players are in the current roster of the Australian national team.

National coach Joseph Uichico told the media that the PBA is making arrangements with the national squad of Qatar for an exhibition series even if the Asiad is weeks away. Qatar is, surprisingly, not included in eurobasket.com’s rankings. (To be continued)