By Aris Barkas/ barkas@eurohoops.net
Athens, Greece – Kendrick Perry is not Montenegrin by birth, but his place in the basketball lore of this Balkanic country is already secured.
Perry has created one of the best tandems in FIBA Basketball alongside Chicago Bulls star center Nikola Vucic and he proved it last September in the FIBA World Cup. Perry had a good game against the USA with 14 points and six assists, as Montenegro ended up finishing 11th in the World, a historic feat for a country of 626,104 residents.
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He built up on this, leading Unicaja Malaga to the Basketball Champions League title and the Spanish League semifinals, while winning also the Basketball Champions League Final Four MVP award.
He wants to keep up doing the same with the national team of his adopted country: “I’m trying to carry over some of that magic from the BCL into the Olympic qualifying tournament. So, just trying to keep up that good energy”.
Speaking about energy, a topic directly comes into mind since Perry and other players who competed in the Philippines have been playing basketball with no break practically for almost one year.
“It’s definitely a challenge, right?”, Perry admitted. “When you think of, you know, physically, mentally, the challenges of going through a whole season with our respective teams and then, going straight into the into representing our national countries, is definitely a challenge”.
On the other hand, however, Perry can’t do anything else: “This is what we signed up for and, you know, we just gotta find a way, more so mentally than physically to to make sure we’re prepared night in and night out”.
“We really have nothing to lose”
That’s why getting into the Olympic Qualifiers, Perry likes the challenge and feels that no matter what his team may achieve in the tournament in Latvia, one of the four that gives a ticket to the Olympics, Montenegro should be congratulated.
As he said: “We’re kind of in a position where we really have nothing to lose. We’ve done a lot to get ourselves to this position. We’ve earned the right to be here, but, you know, we can’t come into it thinking too much. We just have to make sure we’re sharp.
“But at the end of the day, it’s just basketball. So we gotta make sure we have fun with it and enjoy the moment because not a lot of teams are able to compete for something like this”.