Women’s European Championship: Spain

The Spanish team is playing a very good Championship, with three wins in three games. Today they start the second round, playing against Greece.

There are some interesting situations I want to bring here, and I’ll begin with fastbreak and zone offense.

There is a “fastbreak habit” in the Spanish team, and specially in some inside players (e.g. Ana Montañana) that gives them a lot of easy baskets. It’s something Montañana and her teammates do very often in Ros Casares, as I showed some time ago. Now she’s running for Spain too.



Focusing now on the zone offense, the Spanish team runs a simple ball screen to get advantages. As we can see in the video, the ball screen makes the upper line defenders to focus on the ball, causing an offensive superiority on the weak side. The pass’ receiver can shoot, drive or pass, as she has two open teammates.

Spanish Queen's Cup

Last weekend the Women's Cup Tournament (Queen’s Cup) was played in Spain. The teams in the final game were Ros Casares Valencia and EBE Ibiza.

The first one is probably the most powerful Spanish team in the last decade. They are placed in the first spot in the Spanish League and were close to get to the Euroleague Final Four. They have a long team, with very good starters and also very good players coming from the bench (I like to say they’re starters from the bench). So everybody thought it would be an easy game for them. But it wasn’t.

Ibiza’s team showed a great concentration all along the game, they were focused on some situations they didn’t want Ros to score off and they played a serious game with few mistakes. That made the game to reach its final five minutes with the scorer balanced.

One of the things Ibiza did fine was to reduce Ros forward’s production near the basket. They like to post up with their “3’s” (Vesela, Tornikidu, Valdemoro) and they often score many points in that situation.

As we see in the video, they have a play they run very often, where the shooting guard sets a screen for the forward in order to send her to the low post. Then the forward receives in the low post and she plays (the first play comes from an Euroleague game). And we’ll see how Ibiza’s players worked really hard to avoid this situation and how they managed to let Ros score only two points directly off this play (two free throws).

Finally, Ros Casares Valencia won the game, but it was a very interesting confrontation and a really tough final.