The Slovenian national basketball team won the European Basketball Championship 2017 in Istanbul. In my masters degree thesis I've made an analysis of Slovenian players, the gaming performance of each player in attack and at the same time , the gaming performance of the team and attacking structure of the team as a whole. I got the information from official game statistics and video recordings of the four games from the knockout stages.
I've found that the Slovenian national team was, on average, the shortest in height and the youngest. The players of the Slovenian national team were better in most of the basic effectivness indicators, except in rebounds and turnovers. Their game was very fast-paced, which is usually the cause for more turnovers. However, the other teams weren't much better in this aspect. Pivotal for their success were, in our opinion, all the personal fouls the opponents made, or more accurately, the way they were made, as a consequence, the Slovenian team scored 14,7 more points from free throws than the opposition. The most important factor in winning the championship was, in my opinion, their field goal conversion percentage, which was much better in comparison to the other teams that played. Besides the good field goal conversion percentage (47,6%), the Slovenian teams free throw conversion percentage (78.5%) was very good as well. They played, on average, 51,8 set attacks,14,8 transition offense, 4 fastbreaks and they had 22,8 additional attacks that they got from offensive rebounds and fouls. Most of their attacks were scored under the basket in zone 14, their three point field goals were mostly scored in zone 3.
The Slovenian national basketball team played an open attack game with a consistent execution of predetermined individual and team tactics, which greatly contributed to their victory in the finals. Individual quality was very noticeable and along with great team-play it helped them with scoring easy baskets and finishing attacks.
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