Hello basketball fans,
Hope everyone is doing well and enjoying the first week of NBA playoffs as well as the Danish Ligaen playoffs.
Personally my team the Toronto Raptors, are stressing me out. Giannis, is such a match up nightmare, we need a Monstar from the space jam movies to guard that alien. In a few years that Milwaukee team will be scary good.
As far as the Danish Ligaen playoffs, we finally have the two finalists as well as the two teams who will be fighting for a Bronze medal.
Let’s start with the finals. Bakken Bears vs Horsens is obviously the matchup that many Danish basketball fans wanted to see. SISU, who has been impressive during these playoffs, threatened to spoil a third consecutive meeting between these two teams in the Finals but Horsens regained its composure to win the last three meetings.
A big deciding factor during this series will be home court advantage. This series has all the potential of going to Game 7 and that home court could be very key in a deciding game. Then again if Horsens is capable of going into Aarhus and stealing Game 1 and home court advantage, which they are fully capable of doing then things will get very interesting.
The Matchups:
There are some very intriguing match ups in this series. The Point Guards, the wings (Akoon-Purcell and Laerke vs Borovcanin and Lundberg), the Bigs matchup (Diouf and Williamson vs Trist and Artino) is quite juicy as well.
There’s also the coaching that will be quite interesting, Horsens is always a very well prepared team but the Bakken coaching staff seems to have a little more pressure on them with Horsens having won the last two championships. It will be interesting to see these two great coaches go head to head and try to out-coach each other.
The point guard Matchup will be the another deciding factor, both Mack and Gessell are great floor generals but which point guard can control the tempo? Which point guard can slow it down and get his team into an effective half-court set in the last two minutes of a tie game?
This should be a great series that should go to distance. Can Horsens three-peat or will Bakken restore its Danish League dominance from past years? We will know soon.
Bronze Medal:
The Bronze Medal matchup will be interesting as well because both team want to finish out the season a high note. In a one game take all game anything can happen but there always seems to be an unsung hero in these games. A player that wasn’t expected to be a huge factor who comes up big. For SISU, Alassan Touray has the chance to be this player, he is a glue guy who is capable of making huge plays that may not show up on the stat sheet that can turn a game at any moment.
For Svendborg this player is Porta, obviously Porta is a very skilled veteran with big time experience. He is a player who has proven already this season he can take over a game if needed and make clutch shots. Look for him to try and control this game to help his team win.
Both teams seem to have gone through a lot of adversity during the season so obviously a bronze medal would be very rewarding to both organizations. Coach Gudjonsson and the rest of his Svenborg staff have done a great job of adjusting to different situations all year and making sure their team is prepared for late game situations if needed as they have show a few times this year when they’ve came out on top in close games.
As far as the SISU staff, it’s tremendous to see how they have handle the coaching changes and how well prepared they still have been for each and every game. Very impressed with the job coach Eskinazi has done after being thrown into the fire.
Fully expect both teams to give it their all and be prepared for a dog fight.
Enjoy fan! Cheers.
