Base Juan Nunez and center Fran Guerra are the last two discarded from the Spanish basketball team before Eurobasket 2022, which takes place between September 1 and 18 in Germany, the Czech Republic, Georgia and Italy, confirmed this Tuesday the Spanish coach, Sergio Scariolo.
The coach explained that the decisions were made “based on nuances much more internal than visible” and that the difference between the two discarded and the 12 summoned are “minimal”, although he acknowledges that Nunez is left out due to the lack of experience and War for the selection’s commitment to more versatile profiles.
“Juan (Nunez) has gone much further than we thought when we called him just out of the U-20 European Championship. He has done well, he has shown that he is a player who is going to have a bright future with the national team, but I think he still lacks a lot of experience at the international level, at the level of professional competitions. Last year he hardly played with the first team or in the youth academy”, Sergio Scariolo declared at a press conference.
According to the Italian coach, Juan Nunez will improve when he “grows in confidence”, and he predicts a good future for him because he is “a boy with an excellent mentality and very clear ideas”. “Next year will be a very important year for him, to be able to take on the role of a professional player and we will certainly wait for him in December in the windows,” he added.
For his part, the dismissal of Fran Guerra is given by the choice of other profiles in the internal rotation of the team. “Fran plays in a single position, he has done very well, fantastic, and he will be another reference player at this point in the following calls, but we have preferred to opt for players who can cover more roles,” he assured.
Scariolo explained that “regardless of the core, of those who will carry the most important weight in the rotation, the others complement each other just in case, for what may happen, for the mishaps that may occur and different tactical solutions.” “That’s why we prefer that they have the condition to cover at least two roles,” he specified.
“Fran has done very well, he has been until the last moment, we have even had to reason a bit about a relocation of internal roles of the 12 that are going to be. We take players who can play in more roles, because there are some who They still have to reach an acceptable level of form to be able to compete and be able to give the peace of mind of having total solvency in the positions in which we want to employ them”, the coach completed.
The new German Ratiopharm Ulm player and the Lenovo Tenerife center will no longer travel with ‘La Familia’ to Tbilisi (Georgia) to start the first phase of the tournament, in which they will debut this Thursday against Bulgaria. Spain travels this Tuesday and on Wednesday they will have their first training session on the pitch where they will make their debut the following day.
In this way, the Italian coach attends the event with a renewed group, where seven of the 12 players have never yet played a major summer event -World Cup, European or Olympic Games-; only Rudy Fernandez, Willy and Juancho Hernangomez, Usman Garuba and Xabi Lopez-Arostegui know what it means to do it.
Dario Brizuela (Unicaja Basketball).
Lorenzo Brown (Maccabi Tel-Aviv).
Alberto Diaz (Unicaja Basketball).
Jaime Fernandez (Lenovo Tenerife).
Rudy Fernandez (Real Madrid).
Usman Garuba (Houston Rockets).
Juancho Hernangomez (Toronto Raptors).
Willy Hernangomez (New Orleans Pelicans).
Xabi Lopez-Arostegui (Valencia Basket).
Joel Parra (Joventut).
Jaime Pradilla (Valencia Basket).
Sebas Saiz (Alvark Tokyo).
Source: Europa Press
