Originally posted by Baboulia
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Offensive organization still suffers the most as hardest of the African teams contrive to play both stagnantly primitive and overly adventuristic on offense. Yet individual talent is present and in this department African basketball progresses a lot, even if most of the time this talent isn't adequately managed. Moreover, there is a lot of improvement in defensive organization in African basketball, many teams who lack in individual talent and 1-on-1 defense quite successfully use zone defense and overall show a decent to solid level of defensive teamplay and interaction. In fact, I suspect that strengthened and improved defense makes offense in this tournament to look not very impressive. Yep, for example, many fast breaks went down horribly wrong with sloppy moves and retarded shots instead of arranging an easy lay-up but it is in a lrage part due to the fact that opponents now are trying to play some dedicated (and often competent!) defense in these situations as opposed to passive watching of how opponents will arange that easy lay-up. It's just one example but I think that it's pretty indicative of why some games look like brickfests. It's just really improved defense prevailing over improved yet not on that scale offense.
By the way, I think that it is quite logical that Angola was dethroned and that it was exactly Nigeria who did it. I expected this outcome (Nigeria as champion) even before the start of tournament. Congrats to the new champs!
Angola and, to a lesser extent, North African teams show how improved coaching, building a good team chemistry, arranging proper team-play and forcing your 'stars' to adopt to it makes national teams a whole lot of levels stronger. I hope that more and more African NT will learn this lesson and follow this way.
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