Except the huge basketball fans (like me) or sport nuts (again, like me), not many will be interested in the 2006 World Basketball Championship which is taking place right now. Given that USA hasn’t won on the previous two occassions, they want to give a strong performance this time. They took a much more solid team to meet this end as well.

The favourites, as far as I am concerned, are Argentina. They have always performed well at international basketball events. In the recent history, they have won the gold at Athens and came second to Yugoslavia in the World Basketball Championships in 2002. The Argentinean team works well together but more importantly, they are more adept to playing the international basketball rules play (which is quite different from the NBA rules).

As far as this championship is concerned, the big plus for Argentina is Manu Ginobili returning for them. Ginobili has some thing to prove too via the tournament as Draft Express wrote in their preview:

The tournament will be a great opportunity for Ginobili to show the world that he can be a legit go-to guy without the presence of a player in the mould of Tim Duncan.

The tournament will soon enter it’s knock out stages soon (August 26th) and a Spain-Argentina semi final clash and possibly Greece vs. US in the other semi final makes it interesting.

Whom am I supporting? The burger guys of course. The rise continues with a round of 16 spot secured. They face Argentina next and I can see Manu Ginobili is scared to death already.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 24th, 2006 at 8:08 pm and is filed under NBA, Misc. Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.