Happy Holidays everyone! CJ Wallace of Benetton Basket here, hoping you all are having a great holiday season and are preparing to bring in the New Year/Decade in style. For the first time in several years, I was able to return home for some holiday action with family and friends. It was great to see all the relatives on Christmas, and also a lot of fun to hang out with some of my Atlanta friends for a couple days. My flight back to Italy consisted of a three-hour maintenance delay in Atlanta, a lost bag, and a missed-connection re-routing through Amsterdam to Paris and finally Venice. So, 19 travel hours later, and after filing my lost bag report, I was whisked directly to a practice, where needless to say my body was struggling to perform at its highest level. Still, it was worth the travel struggles to be able to spend the holidays at home with my family and closest friends. But now, it is back to work as our squad prepares for a new decade of basketball with a couple more practices to finish up 2009. After granting us a holiday break, our coaches are doing their best to keep us too tired to even think of a New Year's Eve party!

Speaking of New Year's Eve - also known as CJ Wallace's Birthday - all of you blog readers out there are going to have to have a little extra fun in my name, because I will be sleeping and preparing for two very important games coming up. Yes, I'm being serious here. First, on January 3, we have an Italian... more

What’s up Eurocup buddies? CJ Wallace back to give you an early-season update from Treviso. And while I will admit that my blog tail is between my legs after not qualifying for the Euroleague, I have chosen not to dwell on this matter because the Eurocup is a great competition and our team is happy to be one of the participants. That concludes my references to the Euroleague qualification rounds. Now moving on…

This last Tuesday was our first Eurocup game, played against a good Cholet team in France. For me, this game was exciting for several different reasons. First, it was the Eurocup opener and all road games are crucial for moving forward in the competition. We were coming off a terrible home loss to Varese in the Italian competition and desperately needed a win to right the ship. Second, I got to see my old friend Sammy Mejia, who shared a beach front apartment building with me my first year in Capo D'Orlando. I guess Sammy was excited to see me, too, because he gave us a cool 29. Always a pleasure, buddy. And third, our team stayed in what looked to be a haunted chateau in the Cholet countryside. Easily one of the coolest-looking hotels we have stayed in as a team, and obviously Mother Wallace was pumped that I took some pictures and sent them to her.

So there you have it, the game had some excitement around it and the conclusion certainly did not disappoint. It has been a while since I was on the winning end of a buzzer beater. But in this case, courtesy of a great pass from Gary Neal and the ice cold Croat blood of Davor Kus, I was able to do the awesome jubilant running around the court jumping up and down with teammates after Davor’s three dropped in. Also, as I was directly under the basket as the shot... more

What's up, my buddies? Quick update on what's going on in Treviso, as well as a special section dedicated to extended travel. In keeping with the junior high dance analogy, the number of suitors courting the ridiculously hot babes has dwindled to four. We have left: an Italian dude, a French dude, the German guy, and a young man from Greece, all holding strong in their attempts to make extended eye contact with one of the loveliest young ladies. It looks like the French team has taken a liking to the same hot Blondie we are interested in, while the German guy and the young Grecian have taken off their shirts and are flexing their muscles in an attempt to impress a hot brunette over in the corner. Recently, there was nearly an altercation over by the buffet between the Italian guy and the Latvian dude, but one of the pretty good looking girls broke it up and apparently left the dance with the aforementioned Latvian. But the two ridiculously hot babes are still waiting to be swept away. The analogy is getting deep here, still with me?

Moving away from the analogy for a moment, I don't know what happened in Latvia against Ventspils. Yes, it was a long trip, and yes, there were strategically placed 10's sitting courtside, but our whole team, top to bottom, played like a large pile of elephant excrement. We were legitimately lucky to make a run in Game 1 and cut the margin to a manageable five points. And even though we won by 12 three days later in Treviso, it was a battle for the whole 40 minutes. Ventspils is a very young team, but they played super hard, played together, and it seemed like they literally did not miss open shots - ever. They absolutely earned my respect, and I think they will do... more

Hello to all the Euroleague fans out there. CJ Wallace back for my second season trying to step up my blog game to the Euroleague level. Thankfully, the amazingly intelligent and hard-working editors over at the Euroleague website have decided to bring me back for a second season of bloggage. Blogging last year for the Eurocup was my first experience in the blog realm, but apparently my attempts did not go unnoticed. I accepted several blogging awards over the summer, including Blog Newcomer of the year at the Blog Festival in Toronto, the Most Irrelevant Blog for last year's Mariokart piece at the World Blog Gathering in Tokyo, Japan, and Overall Blogger of the Year from the American Blog Association.*** Thank you to all for your support and admiration. However, please make sure you read the footnote marked above by too many asterisks. Honestly though, it's good to be back and I appreciate anybody and everybody who reads these. Though certainly not well written, I hope they are at the very least entertaining,

So the purpose of this blog is to talk a little bit about the upcoming Euroleague qualification rounds and how our team, Benetton Treviso, has been preparing in this preseason. As everyone who plays basketball in Europe knows, preseason is easily the worst part of the season. First of all, it's a ton of practice and very few games. It's a ton of running and conditioning, and very few days off. It's also... more