Sabrina Reghaissia of Union Hainaut gets used to watching Erika de Souza.
As I wrote earlier, it's interesting when players who have been playing on the same WNBA team all year head to Europe and get to face each other in league play. Or even, Euroleague play.
There are some exceptions, however. Erika de Souza was fantastic when she was playing for the Atlanta Dream - but didn't play much due to injury. Whereas Chioma Nnamaka was the last player on the totem pole, getting garbage time in the most garbage-y of situations. You'd expect a de Souza-Nnamaka match to end decisively in favor of de Souza, and that's exactly what happened when Union Hainaut (2-2) visited Ros Casares (2-2) and limped home after a devastating 99-51 defeat.
The game report is here. The boxscore is here, and both have access to a gallery of pics.
The report sums the game up with a few choice statements: "Ros Casares blew the game wide open in the first quarter." They led by 19 points at the end of the first quarter, 23 at halftime, 29 at the end of the third quarters and just pulled it out in the fourth. According to Union Hainaut's coach Fabrice Coucier, "Our intention was to stop their fastbreaks but it was impossible because they have a lot of athletic players."
If the best comparison to Euroleague is an extended version of the NCAA women's basketball tournament - that the Euroleague teams are the best teams in Europe - well, you know that there are only about 16 really good women's college teams...and the rest should just be happy to be invited. Ros Casares has paid for a Euroleague team and expects Euroleague championship results. Isma Canto, the coach of Ros Casares, has a team at the level of Duke or North Carolina. Coucier, however, has the Kent State Golden Flashes of the Euroleague. He's already stated that the team is a young squad, and their biggest problem is that other teams can get inside their head easily.
We suppose that happened in this game. Ros Casares shot 69 percent. They shot 81 percent in their inside game. They won the battle of the rebounds. And turnovers. And got sent to the free throw line more often. There is no analysis of this game, because this game was simply a mugging, where, if you're sitting on the losing bench, you're praying that time will speed up so that you don't lose by fifty points.
For Union Hainait, only one player scored in double digits - Bernadette Ngoyissa led all scorers with 10 points in 17 minutes. Not a single player in Union Hainaut played for more than 23 minutes. Tiffany Stansbury only scored seven points and Chioma Nnamaka only scored five.
As for Ros Casares, four players scored in double figures. Delisha-Milton Jones put up 25 points, shooting 10 for 10 inside the arc. Amaya Valdemoro scored 21 points, and Erika de Souza would score 14 points and eight rebounds.
Each team in the six-team division in which Ros Casares and Union Hainaut belong will play each other home and away - ten games in all. The top four fininshers among the six go to the next round. It looks like Ekaterinburg (4-0) and Ros Casares will go on to bigger and better games in the Euroleague. Union Hainaut, on the other hand, better get used to reading the boxscores and concentrate on the Ligue Féminine de Basket.
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