Ricky Rubio is Euroleague’s ‘Rising Star’ Again

Another honor has been bestowed on Spain’s 19-year-old point guard, Ricky Rubio.

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The Euroleague has announced that the Barcelona playmaker is to receive this season’s Rising Star Trophy.

Rubio, who joined the Catalan club last summer from DKV Joventut, started and played big minutes for Xavier Pascual’s Barcelona team that has reached the Final Four for a second consecutive season.

“It’s an honor to be chosen for this award, above all when a competition as good as the Euroleague recognizes you,” Rubio said. “It really makes you proud, but I know that I got it thanks to the help and support of all my teammates.

“Thanks to them, we have arrived to the Final Four and thanks to them we expect to keep going forward.”

Rubio, the two-time reigning FIBA Europe Young Player of the Year, led Barcelona with four assists and 1.4 steals per contest in the Euroleague. Rubio, 19, is the only player to have started all 20 Euroleague games for Barcelona, which became just the second team all decade to finish the Euroleague regular season undefeated.

He will be one of the main attractions at the FIBA World Championship in Turkey when Spain go after a second straight gold medal in the competition.

The Spaniards will be in Izmir in the Preliminary Round and will take on France, Lithuania, New Zealand, Canada and Lebanon in Group D.

Rubio was selected fifth overall in last year’s NBA Draft by the Minnesota Timberwolves and then helped fire his country to their first-ever gold medal at the EuroBasket.

Barcelona have won the Spanish Supercopa and the Copa del Rey, and they have also clinched first place in the regular-season standings.

Read the original article at FIBA.com.

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Entry Posted on Saturday, April 24th, 2010 at 7:50 am and is filed under Euroleague, Spain. 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.

One Response to “Ricky Rubio is Euroleague’s ‘Rising Star’ Again

  1. anen says:

    it’s not ‘Again’ cause its his first time winning this trophy

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