By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
EuroLeague’s podcast, The Crossover with Joe Arlauckas, is back for its sixth season, featuring Fenerbahce Beko’s Nigel Hayes Davis as the first guest.
The US forward, playing his fifth EuroLeague season, talked about many interesting topics, starting with his brief stint in the NBA and comparing overseas basketball to European basketball.
“The beauty of that is, you know, I can technically say I achieved a dream playing in an NBA game, playing in some games, and then coming to Europe and really learning more about how to play basketball. Like, it’s two different worlds. Honestly. The NBA and EuroLeague are two completely different brands of basketball. They’re not even comparable,” Nigel Hayes Davis said.
After his European debut with Galatasaray, he played for Sarunas Jasikevicius in Zalgiris and Barcelona before joining Fenerbahce last year. The Lithuanian had a significant impact on his career.
“The Xs and Os that Saras has and just the basketball mind, to be around that. I always tell people he’s one of the smartest minds I’ve been around. What I appreciate the most is that he, and I told him too, even though he wasn’t a great defender, he helped me be a great one.”
Fenerbahce was on the verge of the Final Four last season but eventually lost to Olympiacos in a thrilling quarterfinal series that went to a do-or-die fifth match in Piraeus.
“They were a great team, and honestly, like what anybody says, to be a championship team, and as great as they were, they earned the level of luck they got in that game when he shot from Sloukas because honestly, we outplayed them that game,” Davis-Hayes lamented. “That would have been three wins in a row. We lost the first one, and we outplayed them for three games in a row. And we should have won, should have won the series 3-1.”
Hayes Davis is once again one of the key players in Dimitris Itoudis’ squad, averaging almost 33 minutes on the court per match in EuroLeague. It’s because of his basketball abilities, but also because of his character and personality. He is undoubtedly one of the most interesting personas in the EuroLeague, and to better understand him, it’s best to hear about his relationships with his mother, Talaya Davis, and his stepfather, Albert Davis.
“I talk about my stepfather all the time. And everyone’s like, ‘Oh, what about your mom?’ But everyone knows that I love my mother dearly. Of course, I love my mother so much that, like, in order to save my life, let’s say we’re walking down the street and I had to push my stepfather in front of a truck to save my mother. I wouldn’t even think about pushing him. But the reason why he’s so amazing is he would go before I could push him because he wouldn’t want me to feel bad about it, and he would care that much about my mother and myself. So, like, that’s the relationship. Like, I’d push him in front of a truck for my mom, but he would jump before I could push him,” Hayes Davis concluded.