By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Maccabi’s Lorenzo Brown got a Spanish passport and the ability to play in the Spanish national team, however, this move has already raised a lot of eyebrows and created reactions.
Spain remains a powerhouse in FIBA basketball and having a US guard running the point in the national team seems alien to a lot of people, including Rudy Fernandez.
“I have already told the president of the federation and as captain, I had to give my opinion,” he said during the presentation of his basketball camp.
For Fernandez, the issue is not Brown’s nationality, but the fact that he has no ties to Spanish basketball: “It doesn’t seem right to me. I found out from the press that they had nationalized that player, who had no link with the country. I had the honor of having played with Mirotic and with Ibaka. They are foreign players, but they have been trained in a Spanish youth academy since they were very young, and in that sense, they had a special bond with our country”.
Coach Sergio Scariolo also explained his position, taking a distance from the decision to give to Brown a Spanish passport.
As he said to “AS”: “A few months ago I received, from the Spanish federation, the communication that Lorenzo Brown, through his representatives, had expressed the will to leave the American nationality to take the Spanish one. They asked me if he knew him. I would never have imagined that an American player, established in the Euroleague, would have thought of something like this. Honestly, it was a tremendous surprise. They asked me if I knew him and I said yes because he had trained him and that, on a technical and personal level, he is a good player who could help the team. I did not enter into any political issue or any assessment of anything else. I am a coach, I have received a notice with a request for an opinion”.
The Spanish national team coach firmly denied that he asked specifically for Brown to be a member of the team: “Not at all. It is false, I do not know who may have had the audacity to invent it. It’s another thing that I expressed my concern about the state of the point guard position taking into account the injuries of Ricky Rubio, Carlos Alocen, and the unavailability of Sergio Rodríguez and Guillem Vives, who theoretically would be the first four players in the ranking”.
This is a direct answer to Spanish federation president Jorge Garbajosa quote that the addition of Brown may address a need of the national team.