2011 Adidas Eurocamp Blog - Day 3
Day 3
Yesterday brought some personal interviews for some of the camp's top players like Jonas Valanciunas, Donatas Motiejunas and Bismack Biyombo to make an impression teams, which was all the more important for Biyombo and Motiejunas after they failed to impress in their individual workouts. For Brazilian center Lucas Nogueira who blew us away last summer in the FIBA tournament with his length, athleticism and shot blocking abilities, he put forth an extremely weak effort in this camp as well as the Nike Hoop Summit, and therefore dropped his name from the 2011 NBA Draft. French point guard Andrew Albicy did the same.
Overall from this camp, we can push the Congo power forward Biyombo down a little bit. We had previously had him going as high as 7 or 8 to Sacramento and Detroit, but due to his poor individual workouts, where he looked out of sync and didn't finish many shots outside of five or six feet. The workout focused on areas where he isn't particularly strong; this is a bit of a disappointment given his superb athleticism and freakish 7'6" wingspan. We can expect Biyombo to slide a few spots, but due to his potential as a defensive stopper, he should still be in between the 10-20 range.
Motiejunas, who also had a poor workout due to the fact that he couldn't put the ball in the hole with his jumper. He missed plenty of shots and also seemed to get winded through the longer stretches of shooting in his workouts. On the bright side, Motiejunas has added an apparent 10-15 pounds to his long frame, which is exactly what we were looking for. This one poor shooting performance won't damage his stock terribly, but given that we had all known him to be a very solid mid-range shooter, it was a bit surprising. He's a bit lower than Biyombo on our Big Board and we can expect him realistically to go mid-first round to about 23 or 24 would be his floor.
Latvian small forward Davis Bertans will be keeping his name in the draft, backing up his agent's word that he was looking for a first-round guarantee. Since Bertans is still in the draft today, we can expect that he received that promise from somebody.
By President Corey Ruff - 6-14-11
