By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
New Euroleague Basketball CEO Marshall Glickman, a former executive with both the Portland Trail Blazers and the NBA, spoke at length in The Crossover with Joe Arlauckas about some of his goals for Europe’s premier basketball competition.
“I think we want to be different than the NBA. For basketball fans, fantastic, but we also need to reach people who are not necessarily devoted or kind of hard-core fans. We need to reach the outer ring, people who just enjoy having fun, people who enjoy having a good time,” Glickman explained.
After these first months as the new CEO, Glickman thinks there is a lot of space for growth and talks about the areas that can make a difference:
“I’m very optimistic. We have some really big challenges. We are working things out, I hope, with our clubs because there are certain clubs that have different perspectives which would be normal… But I’m hoping that we can put all of this together by addressing literally what’s our event strategy, what’s our partnership strategy, what’s our market expansion strategy? How can we simplify our governance and our legal structure? Could we find peace with FIBA? How can we tell our stories better? How do we address financial fair play… We are looking at all of that at the same time. It’s a great ride and I’m very optimistic that the outcome of all that, I like to call it EuroLeague 3.0, is something that I’m really looking forward to.”
Glickman also talks about the potential addition of more teams and how it could be done without losing one of the league’s core values: the fact that every game matters:
“We have to be careful with adding more teams because it’s what makes it so special, right? I think more teams are inevitable but there’s not going to be more calendar spots is there?… Right now, this format that we have is fantastic and it’s the thing that propelled us to the next level… There’s no magical solution but I think we are going to have to go to conferences [in the event that more teams are added to the league.]”