Hey, Euroleague fans! Damir Markota of Union Olimpija here, coming back at you at the break in the Top 16. My first blog was about a big road victory to start this round. I wish I could tell you we added another win or two, but that is not the case...yet. We came very close in our next game but couldn't have been further away from winning the third. We are not looking backwards now, however. The break in the Euroleague schedule will likely benefit our team as much as any. We are a veteran team with a lot of the older guys playing a lot of minutes, more than many of the opponents we go up against. After doing that all season, I think they are feeling it a bit, so this rest comes just in the nick of time. I know that I can use the rest, and even though I am playing more minutes than ever, I am not quite up to the time spent on the court by Kenny Gregory, Vlado Ilievski and Saso Ozbolt, who are ranked first, second and fourth, respectively, in minutes during the Top 16. I am not talking about fatigue, so much, but after playing five months with a seven- or eight-man rotation, the small injures start to come; the hamstring, the back, the foot. Guys like Kenny Gregory and Georgi Shermadini are going through that now. When you think about it, that might be a reason for our problems now, but not an excuse. Nobody on Olimpija thinks in excuses. So we'll take our rest, try to win the Slovenian Cup this weekend as a team and be re-start the Top 16 next... more

Greetings from the team everyone is calling the surprise of the Turkish Airlines Euroleague this season. I am Damir Markota, and our team is Union Olimpija of Ljubljana, Slovenia. I don't know about us being the biggest surprise in the Euroleague, but for sure some surprising things have happened to us, both good and bad. For the moment, I'll just take one good thing and say that right now, there might be no more fun place to be than our gym, Stozice Arena, on game nights in the Euroleague. And that will be particularly true this week, with the defending champions of from Barcelona coming to town. There will be 13,000 people waiting for them, and more excitement in the air than you can imagine.

I said that our team is full of surprises, and I guess I am one of them, because of the route I took to basketball, and the people I met along the way. I lived in Sarajevo as a kid, and because of the war there, my family moved to Sweden when I was 6 or 7. I used to play basketball in the street, and when I was about 10, my mother saw an ad for a basketball club. I started to play there and made friends with another kid, Maciej Lampe, who lived five minutes away. We walked to practice together two or three times a week. A few years later, when we were just 14 and 15, we both left Sweden - which is not a big basketball country, as you know - to start our careers elsewhere. I went to Cibona Zagreb and Maciej to Real Madrid. It was not easy living on your own at that age, in an apartment, without your parents, when you don't know how to cook, wash, nothing. For the first two years, I was on the phone asking to get out of there. But if I wanted to become a big player, I had to stay, because Cibona was a... more