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Detente in Europe Marciulionis drives unification of pro leagues
Imagine that you were starting a pro basketball league and had a chance to call it "the NBA." In Europe, the equivalent has already happened. The owners of such top-flight European clubs as Real Madrid, Fortitudo Bologna, Zalgiris Kaunas and Olympiakos Piraeus did as much a year ago. They were peeved that FIBA, the hidebound curator of the league to which they all belonged, the EuroLeague, wasn't returning more marketing and TV revenue to their coffers. So they broke away to form a league of their own. To their delight -- and FIBA's utter mortification -- they discovered that FIBA never protected the name "EuroLeague." And so, in European hoops today, the insurgent league, run by an outfit known as the Union of European Basketball Leagues (ULEB), is now called the EuroLeague. FIBA slinked off to lick its wounds, rechristening the rump of its old EuroLeague "the SuproLeague." It's been a nasty state of affairs -- peevish, confusing, all the more regrettable because continental basketball sorely needs unity, not infighting, to advance the sport in countries where soccer is king. But there may be a peacemaker on the horizon in former NBA guard Sarunas Marciulionis, who starred in the Olympics for both the old U.S.S.R. and his homeland of Lithuania. Marciulionis founded the Northern European Basketball League two years ago. He began with the hoops know-how and tradition in the Baltic states from which he hails. He married to it Scandinavian capital and business savvy. And he applied lessons he'd learned up close during his NBA career. His recipe has been so appealing that there's a waiting list of clubs hoping to join the NEBL, which now features 16 teams flung across 12 countries. Among its members: CSKA Moscow, the storied Red Army team that nurtured most of the great players in the old Soviet Union; Kyiv Kiev, the Ukrainian club founded by Alexander Volkov, the ex-Atlanta Hawk who's Marciulionis' friend and former Soviet national teammate; Haribo London Towers, one of the top British clubs; and a fusion of three Danish clubs called the Magic Great Danes (the name indicates the former L.A. Laker who graces the team's roster and helps spread hoops through Scandinavia, even if he doesn't suit up for every game.) Most important, FIBA and ULEB are now looking to Marciulionis to help them avoid mutually assured destruction. Sources tell me that Marciulionis spent five hours in Washington, D.C., over NBA All-Star Weekend meeting with ULEB pooh-bahs. Meanwhile, FIBA's general assembly recently approved a proposal, introduced by the Lithuanian Basketball Federation, to organize European club competition "in a conference system" -- in other words, based on the regional model pioneered by the NEBL. "I never thought I'd see the day when FIBA would be challenged, and ULEB's done just that," says an American expat who has spent several decades as a coach and executive in Europe. "Still, there's a lot of sorting out to be done before any of this comes to pass. One thing you learn over here is to believe nothing until you see it." Nonetheless, this hoops wise man confirms that the future could easily take the form of three leagues dominating Europe in west-to-east swaths: Marciulionis' NEBL in the north, FIBA's SuproLeague in the middle and ULEB's EuroLeague in the Mediterranean, where the basketball powerhouses of Spain, Italy, Greece and Serbia all lie. Natural rivalries would be preserved and stoked through a regular season. Then each entity would send forth its finest clubs for a playoff to crown an undisputed, unified European champ. The odds of all this happening? Consider the driving force. There's no better measure of Marciulionis' determination than this detail from his past: Growing up, he won a slew of Lithuanian age-group tennis titles, ambidextrously -- by hitting nothing but forehands. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. Send comments to thehooplife@aol.com.
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