Jugadores internacionales hacen de la NBA un juego global

By JOE JULIANO

Philadelphia Inquirer

PHILADELPHIA - Most NBA draft-niks had fallen asleep by the time the San Antonio Spurs, with the 57th overall pick in the 1999 draft, took a chance on a player from Argentina who had performed well during his first season with the club team Reggio Calabria of Italy.

The Spurs waited three years for the player to come from Italy. In the three seasons since, Manu Ginobili has become one of the league's impact players. He has been part of two NBA championship teams and the squad that won the Olympic gold medal last summer in Athens, Greece.

When Ginobili was drafted, NBA teams didn't pay much attention to basketball overseas, getting the vast majority of international players from U.S. colleges.

But the development of players such as Ginobili, Dallas' Dirk Nowitzki (Germany) and Sacramento's Peja Stojakovic (Serbia-Montenegro) changed all that. In the 2002 draft, Houston made center Yao Ming (China) the No. 1 pick.

GLOBAL GAME

The 76ers are no exception when it comes to international scouting.

"At that time, the success of European players in the NBA was not that great," said Tony DiLeo, the Sixers' senior vice president and assistant general manager, who heads the team's scouting operations.

"Now that's a hotbed for scouting. I don't think you'll see many unknown players slip that far. I think that the success of Ginobili and other European players really perked up the interest of NBA teams. I think NBA scouting now has even more of an emphasis over there than in the United States."

The Sixers have a European scouting coordinator, Danko Cvjeticanin, a Croatian who played on the national team with former Sixer Toni Kukoc. But their scouting has expanded in recent years and now extends globally.

DiLeo said the Sixers have consultants working for them in South America, Asia and Africa.

"We cover all the bases," he said. "They will identify the players for us. If they're in the draft, we have some background information and we can go. It's a global game now. The success of the NBA going all over, and then the success of international teams in the Olympics, really has made it a global game."

The Sixers have drafted only three international players who did not play college basketball in the United States: Marko Milic (1997) and Jiri Welsch (2002) of Slovenia, and Paccelis Morlende (2003) of France. None of the three ever played a minute for the Sixers, although Morlende brought the Sixers Willie Green in a draft-night trade.

The Sixers do their homework. In pre-draft workouts last week, they brought in players from Croatia, Germany, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Brazil. They have the 45th pick in Tuesday's draft.

Sixers president and general manager Billy King said international scouting has been a priority since he became the GM in 1998. Shortly after taking the job, he hired Cvjeticanin, whom he played against in the 1987 World University Games.

"It's really exploded," King said. "We've been fortunate in having Danko. With him and our foreign consultants, they really help us in preparing for the draft."

Cvjeticanin, who sat in on last week's workouts, said scouting in Europe is more important then ever. He said 30 NBA scouts and officials recently were in Treviso, Italy, to watch the European Reebok camp.

"International basketball has improved so much in the last five years," he said. "You can see the result in competitions like the world championships or the Olympic Games. You can find so many good players. We don't have a big number of players, but some of them are very talented and know how to play."

IDENTIFY PLAYERS EARLY

Cvjeticanin said he will start looking at talented European players when they are 15 or 16, and then keep an eye on them to see how they progress through the years. He said age-group competitions for under-16, under-18 and under-21 are helpful in making judgments.

When Cvjeticanin was a player in Croatia, DiLeo said, coaches were looking for a way to compete with the United States, and they developed a plan.

"Danko told me the story: `We have to become great fundamentally and play as a team, because individually we will not be as good as the individual players in America,' " DiLeo said.

"So you can see the development of big guys that are so fundamentally sound, like (Vlade) Divac. They really play together, and you can see the success of teams in international competitions."

DiLeo and Courtney Witte, the Sixers' director of player personnel, make as many as five trips to Europe every season to see prospects. Cvjeticanin flies to Philadelphia two or three times a year to give his observations. It's more important than ever to find a hidden Ginobili in the growing glut of players.

"It's really, really major," DiLeo said. "It's almost more important to know what's happening over there (than) it is here in the United States."