Basketball Jones

The problem with not blogging often is that I have to back track to explain things before I get to the good stuff (a little teaser for my next blog... :) ). So for starters, let me explain the basketball situation here as best I can. Our team is in 3 different leagues-

• The Lithuanian League (Lietuvos Moteru Krepsinio Lyga aka the LMKL) which runs from now until Christmas. As you'd guess, we just play teams from all over Lithuania and apparently we are supposed to beat all of them by double digits.
• The Baltic League which I really don't know much about yet except that it starts after the new year.
• The Euroleague which is basically the top women's basketball league in the world. There are teams from all over in the league, but you start by playing a home-and-home with the ones in your pool. We probably got the toughest draw of anyone and are placed in arguably the best pool. All the teams have a few WNBA stars on them, including the 4-time defending Euroleague champs Russian Spartak team with Sue Bird and Lauren Jackson (and they previously had Diana Turasi too). This league is gonna be a big challenge for us, but basically these games are what we work for and everything we've done these past couple weeks has been to prepare us for them. The cool part of this league too is that I basically get to travel all around the world. The teams in our pool are from Spain, Turkey, Russia, France and the Czech Republic. Not sure how much actual site seeing or free time we get on trips but it will at least be pretty sweet to see all these places and of course get a few more stamps in my passport. :)

The 15th was our first LMKL game and as predicted we killed them, 112-48. Nope, that's not a typo. We dominated from beginning to end. I've been on some good teams in the past but I don't think I've ever been a part of such a big blowout (at least on this end of it...ha). So needless to say, it was a good way to start off the league play!

We took a semi-break from LMKL and played our last practice game on the 20th against TTT Riga who is a good Euroleague team from Latvia. We had played them at their place 2 weeks ago and lost by 20. It was a bad loss for us as we just weren't clicking all game (and I have to say that they were hitting shots out of their minds too). This game was a different story though. We played solid and they came back down to earth a bit. It was a tough game, very physical, but we pulled out a big 15 point victory! It was pretty exciting to get a little revenge, beat a good team and to see how far we'd grown as a team in those 2 weeks.

The 22nd was our next LMKL game and although we won 87-57 it wasn't our best game. I think it was a combination of things- knowing we won our last LMKL game by 60+ points, beating a good Euroleague team so handily and then our upcoming game against Spartak the next week looming over us....whatever it was, we were off our game. I think part of it can also be attributed to the fact that the other team was playing so helter-skelter that we played down to their level a bit, so I guess this was a good test for us to know that no matter who we play, we need to just play our game. And although the 30 point victory was good, coach wasn't happy enough with our effort (and that we had so many turnovers and gave up so many offensive rebounds) so that resulted in 2 practices that Saturday instead of our typical 1. Bummer. But I guess it'll be worth it in the long run. (Yes, another teaser! :) )

Now as for me personally in these games, I've held my own. My playing time is pretty inconsistent so it's sometimes hard but I just try to always be ready and do my best when I get in. Giedre and Vita are our starting (and primary) post players and then their sub minutes are divided between Lina, Kristina and I. I'm not always sure of Coach's reasoning but the break up of these minutes fluctuates game to game. It's frustrating at times I have to admit, especially since I'm not used to this situation and really want to play obviously. I'm definitely a team-first player, but at the same time this mentality has been another adjustment here since playing basketball is actually my job now. It'd be a lot easier to not worry about playing time as much if my whole way of living here wasn't dependent on it. I'm definitely giving it my all every day but all that really matters is what you produce in games and right now that's a struggle for me. This isn't supposed to be a rant by any means, but rather just an honest viewpoint of an overseas professional basketball player. But regardless of anything else, the fact that I'm absolutely loving my time over here is even more of a motivator to keep working hard and just hope that it'll pay off (hopefully sooner rather than later).