So when looking across the pond to watch EuroBasket it is not very common to see two players opening the tournament who have played for the same team. This happened when the French national team took on the German national team with two ex-Atlanta Hawks players.
This is a somewhat heavyweight battle as far as world rankings go with the French sitting in the fifth position and the Germans sitting just outside the top-ten, in 11th. It is no wonder that the French national team is so high up in the world, boasting six current or former NBA players including the best defender on the planet, Rudy Gobert.
However, he is not one of the players that we are looking at here. Our players of interest in this game are Timothe Luwawu-Cabarrot who is representing the French national team and Dennis Schroder who has already started to achieve his goal of taking Germany deep into EuroBasket by leading his team past a higher-ranked rival.
Unfortunately, neither ex-Atlanta Hawks player had a huge impact on the result.
It comes as no surprise to those who watched him last season that Luwawu-Cabarrot did not have a huge impact on the result. He went from shooting to lights out in one game to blowing multiple uncontested layups in the next game all last season. Still, TLC had five points on two of two shooting, including knocking down a free throw. He also collected five rebounds.
Schroder played well without being the star of the team. He did score 11 points on 4-of-14 shooting as well as filling up the stat line with five assists, one rebound, one steal, and a block in just over 30 minutes. however, on top of that, he did have five turnovers.
It was a really good start to the tournament for the German team with other players stepping up when Schroder was a bit down from his best. Hopefully, the French team can bounce back from this loss as well, their starting unit needs to step up.