Our team officially ended vacations today. The players, not involved to the National Teams campaign, got back to Moscow and started preseason preparations.
CSKA got used to sending the players to the National Teams every year. But it is difficult to recall the similar number of those in the past. 10 persons are missing: Russians Semen Antonov, Andrey Vorontsevich, Mikhail Kulagin, Nikita Kurbanov, Vitaly Fridzon, scout Denis Godlevskiy and doctor Roman Abzhelilov, Frenchmen Nando De Colo and Leo Westermann as well as Spaniard Sergio Rodrigues. Eight players – more than a half of the roster.
Not surprisingly the Red Blues will start practicing in missed lineup. Most part of reinforcement will come from CSKA-2. Taking into account that the team is practically left with no point guards the coaches used the help from aside. Guard Dimitris Katsivelis will prepare with CSKA. The Greek played for Astana last season. He will join the team on Thursday and stay until the Gomelsky Cup if he doesn’t sign the contract earlier.
“We are happy to start, to come back to Moscow,” CSKA head coach Dimitris Itoudis said. “We’ve done good job during the summer so I would like to thank club’s sponsors and management, for the effort of building the best team possible. Obviously we have certain changes, we miss several players to the National Teams but at the same time we are honored to have such quality players to play for Russia, France and Spain. The first wish is to stay healthy, the players who are here and those on Eurobasket. Second, we have to get our newcomers understand our philosophy faster. We will use the help of our young guys, some of them are actually veterans with us in our camps. We start with conditioning and easily involve basketball during the first week. The coaching staff stayed in contact with players during the offseason, most of them had own schedules from Kostas and worked out. So the week will be the follow up to physical conditions of the players. Next week we will start doing more basketball things, adding some tactics. We talked with Andrey and Natasha about the fact that Misha will most probably make it to the final roster of Russian National Team, and with Nando, Leo, Sergio also out our point guard position is open. Despite the fact that we have Gavrilov we had to add someone. So we checked what free agent guards are available. So I use this opportunity to thank the agents for the offers. Katsivelis already played in VTB League, he knows us. We thank him and we would like him to stay including the Zadar Tournament though it depends on his contract situation.”
Preseason program traditionally started from medical tests in GMS Clinic in the morning and continued with conditioning tests held by trainers Kostas Chatzichristos and Evgeny Burin in the evening. Actually the Army Men already worked out here at CSKA: Pavel Korobkov and newcomer Alan Makiev visited the gym. Now, with Will Clyburn, Othello Hunter, Kyle Hines, Cory Higgins and Victor Khryapa back to Moscow, we have The Magnificent Seven collected.
“The whole point of testing is to see, what conditions our players are in,” Kostas Chatzichristos said. “We want to see how they spent a summer, and this will give us an indication how to start our training this preseason. We also want to knew everything possible about our new guys, their injury past and risk, to realize how to train them better. So we will collect this information, quickly analyze it and build our program around that. The whole effort initially will be directed to better conditioning, getting strong and allowing the players to prepare and handle the load during the season.”
CSKA preseason program starts on September 6 with the game vs MBA Moscow, Russian Superleague 1 team. It is supposed that first 4 games of the Army Men (MBA, UNICS, AEK, Kymi) will be played behind closed doors.
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