• Monaco plays the Euroleague Final Four, and begins with a semifinal against Olympiakos on Friday night.
  • The Roca Team puts an end to twenty-six years of absence of French clubs at this level of the competition. It is therefore all the basketball tricolor that will ignite behind Mike James and others.
  • This Final Four should attract a new audience, rather NBA fan.

The France championship certainly didn't plan for that. What is the idea to stall a day of Betclic Elite three days before the Euroleague Final Four in Lithuania? So, to face Blois on Tuesday, Monaco had sent its team hopefuls, reinforced only by Matthew Strazel and Yoan Makoundou, who do not play the leading roles in the Euroleague. This allowed the first team to prepare well for the European meeting, starting with the semi-final against Olympiakos on Friday.

"We had time to prepare for this deadline, it seems long, but it's very short at the same time," said Yakuba Ouattara, the Monegasque full-back. We're super excited, like everyone else. There is a big craze around it, because it is something huge for the country of Monaco and French basketball. Indeed, no French club had set foot in the Final Four since Delaney Rudd's Asvel in 1997. A time when only two Americans were allowed per team, when PSG had a basketball club in the elite and when Pau-Orthez was still a team fighting for the title.

"There's something going on"

So, to see again, thirty years after Limoges, a team capable of engraving its name at the top of European basketball, it puts a few little butterflies in your stomach. In Monaco, the Gaston-Médecin room will broadcast the matches on a giant screen for free, the Rock will display the colors of the Roca Team and a small colony is expected in Lithuania to support Mike James and others, for € 1,200 for the three days. On the rest of the territory, despite some diehards who still resist the red and white colors, it will push hard behind Monaco this weekend.


The Top 5 Plays of @ASMonaco_Basket so far this season 👇

'Top Plays' I @TurkishAirlines pic.twitter.com/jJWQLaAauS

— Turkish Airlines EuroLeague (@EuroLeague) May 14, 2023

Access to this content has been blocked in order to respect your choice of consent

By clicking on "I ACCEPT", you accept the deposit of cookies by external services and will thus have access to the content of our partners

I AGREE

And to better pay 20 Minutes, do not hesitate to accept all cookies, even for one day only, via our button "I accept for today" in the banner below.

More information on the Cookie Policy page.


"There is something happening, and not only on the scale of Monaco, we feel it, we see it," Ouattara said. We receive a lot of messages of support from opposing players, from the basketball world in general. Comparable to what the Asvel had experienced at the time?

This qualification had been quite resounding in France, recalls Greg Beugnot, the former coach of Asvel with the voice still as cavernous. Personalities like Aimé Jacquet had congratulated us, everyone in the world of sport appreciated our qualification. Today, I think there is a lot of enthusiasm behind Monaco, even if there are bad tongues who say that Monaco is not the France et patati, patata. I find it completely stupid, because what they have done is a real feat. »

NBA fans supporting?

A feat that almost supplanted the NBA, at the time when the playoffs are played. Trashtalk, the reference media in the field, has even started talking about Monaco, while French and European basketball is very little relayed. "And, in terms of audience, it has a lot of repercussions," says Arthur Baudin, a journalist at Trashtalk. It was really well received by our readership. On Twitter, Monaco comes back a lot in the middle of NBA discussions and they bring a lot of people to the Euroleague. I think that this Friday night, a lot of basketball fans will put themselves in front of the semifinal. »

NBA fans who were thrilled to see Game 2 between Boston and Miami on the night of this Friday to Saturday, may take a curious look at the Euroleague semifinal. "We can have 10% of this population who live only for the NBA who can turn to European basketball because Monaco is in the Final Four," says Greg Beugnot. However, reports Arthur Baudin, all these beautiful people would do well to get up to date with Europe. "A Final Four is forty minutes of fighting, whereas in the NBA, you're almost thinking that the game starts in the third or fourth quarter. We really have this notion of fighting, of war wrestling, almost, with an audience that pushes, which is not the case in the NBA. »

"It's really beautiful basketball"

So repack your Jayson Tatum and Jimmy Butler (for a weekend, at least), here we will vibrate with Mike James, Elie Okobo and Donatas Motiejūnas. Especially since the game practiced by Sasa Obradovic's men is exciting for any fan of the big orange ball. "It's one of the teams that plays the best collectively in Europe, and I'm not saying that because I'm chauvinistic," says Greg Beugnot. There are deficits in some positions compared to some big teams, but collectively, what is it playing well, what is it clean. It's really beautiful basketball. »



And we dare to challenge anyone to tell us that the heart did not throb during Game 5 of the quarterfinals against Maccabi, with a stunning fourth quarter, in the hell of the Gaston-Médecin room. Elie Okobo's penetrations, Donta Hall's dunks, Jordan Loyd's long-distance shots, Mike James' jokes will, without a doubt, get you off the couch this weekend.

And not only this weekend, hopes Fabrice Jouhaud, the general manager of the National Basketball League: "There is something ultrapositive and everyone hopes that it is not just a stroke of brilliance, with an ephemeral repercussion. For us, it's perfect, just as our own play-offs start. Even if the halls are full whatever happens, it still increases the overall media interest tenfold, because people, without going to gyms, will be interested in basketball, will wonder against who Monaco plays in the LNB play-off. It will be against Strasbourg. The first round, scheduled for Saturday, has been postponed. Ah, yes, that too, the LNB had not anticipated it too much.

  • Euroleague
  • NBA
  • AS Monaco
  • Basketball
  • Olympiakos
  • Sport