Even today, the huddle forms seconds before the game starts.
Sergio Scariolo's players gather on the synthetic, hug you and you:
–1, 2, 3, ¡wall!
And that's what they say, "1, 2, 3, wall!", and not something simpler, like, "let's go!", or "go for them!".
The wall comes from years ago, from the times when the Gasol brothers, Navarro, Calderón, Felipe Reyes, Raül López or Álex Mumbrú were kids who were around (or exceeded) two meters tall and in the twilight they broke the seams of the concentration and they were confused with the shadows: then they left their bedrooms at the Bahía Sur sports complex, in San Fernando, they tiptoed through the corridors and finally dodged the wall of the enclosure to disperse in the Cadiz night.
Wall!
(...)
The second swords were going to know that story, that of the wall, through the FIBA windows, their great opportunity.
The FIBA windows had been relaunched in 2017. They are stones in the basketball calendar, boulders that irritate the big leagues and the big clubs. Neither the NBA nor the Euroleague players usually appear in those windows, nine-day breaks designed for the teams to face each other, looking for a place in European, World Cup and Olympic Games.
The windows, it was presumed, were going to be especially burdensome for teams like Sergio Scariolo's Spain, a treasure dotted with NBA players and European basketball stars.
“It had been in that summer of 2017 – voices from the Spanish Basketball Federation (FEB) tell us – when we decided to organize a concentration in Benahavís (Málaga) to bring together those players who had never before been in a great championship, people like Pierre Oriola, Pau Ribas, Jaime Fernández, Quino Colom, Víctor Arteaga or Javier Beiran”.
The windows seemed designed for these, the second swords: there was a month and a half left for the 2017 Eurobasket and, it was assumed, none of those concentrated in Benahavís was going to appear in the great tournament (only Oriola would; Spain was bronze).
However, already then all of them were discovering the mechanics of Scariolo.
And that was going to make things easier, because many of them would end up becoming regulars in the FIBA windows and even earning a place in the 2019 World Cup (Colom, Oriola, Xavier Rabaseda and Beiran; Spain was gold), while the rest continued to take advantage those accelerated courses to immerse yourself in the Scariolo systems: "I am referring to Jaime Fernández, Xabier López-Arostegui or Joel Parra (all three have participated in this triumphant Eurobasket in Berlin)", says our informant.
So the history of the wall was going to be transferred between generations, window by window, just like the pocha games and Scariolo's instructions, maddeningly intense when handling blackboard in hand:
"Anyone who has played in a FIBA window instantly interprets Scariolo's looks and gestures."
This is the case of Alberto Díaz; according to some, the unexpected revelation of this set.
Díaz (28), Unicaja point guard and Teaching student, had spent a couple of years committing himself in the FIBA windows and diving into Scariolo's mechanics before being ruled out at the last moment, because the shadow of Ricky Rubio (injured) or Sergio Llull (injured) is elongated.
“I thought I would watch the Eurobasket from the sofa. But then Llull was injured and they called me”, Díaz recounted these days.
So, when he appeared in the Eurobasket, Díaz – second sword like most of the members of this Spain – did not come from nowhere, but from years of immersion in the system: even short of filming, he was ready to jump a wall and even steal some brick.
(...)
The express nationalization of Lorenzo Brown deserves a separate chapter.
