You're reading: Basketball on the rebound in Ukraine

Basketball may be one of America’s favorite spectator sports, but in Ukraine its popularity pales in comparison to football. However, 2015 might bring a shift. That year Ukraine will host the biennial 24-team European basketball championship known as EuroBasket.

Although oligarchs and big business groups own most major basketball clubs, the sport survives in the nation in almost complete obscurity. In Soviet days, basketball teams were sponsored by various government agencies and state industrial giants.

All of the Ukrainian Super League’s 14 teams – the counterpart of America’s 30-team National Basketball Association – have good financial backing and are part of the Ukrainian Association of Basketball. But not all of them have been equally lucky in competition.

Kyiv’s Budivelnyk team is a legendary club whose history dates back to the Soviet days. It has won the league championship seven times since 1992. Azovmash, a team based in the eastern Ukrainian city of Mariupol since 1990, also has scored seven titles since the league’s inception. Last season’s top club, Donetsk, was formed only in 2006.

The three clubs now regularly compete in the Europe Cup, a second-tier international basketball tournament in Europe.

A Ukrainian national basketball team has never played in either the Olympics or a world championship. And it has never placed higher than 13th in five appearances at the EuroBasket. But the national team qualified for the 2013 EuroBasket, and will have home-court advantage when it hosts the tournament in 2015.

Ukraine’s forward Oleksiy Pecherov (right) and team manager Mike Fratello talk after a press conference before the basketball players departed Kyiv for the European basketball championship in Lithuania last year. (UNIAN)

Most professional Ukrainian teams lack pedigrees having only appeared after Ukraine gained independence. Usually someone rich, who most often is partial to the sport, founds the team. A case in point is the team Kyiv. It was formed in 1999 by Olympic champion and former NBA player Oleksander Volkov. He is the current president of Ukraine’s basketball federation.

Having a patron like that can be a double-edged sword for the team, though. If someone decides to drop the team for one reason or another, the team might become extinct. This almost happened to club Donetsk 2010 because its president, Serhiy Dyadechko, quit his post and stopped financing the team. Luckily, the team found other sponsors.

A basketball club typically has at least 15 players and a support staff of 12. Predictably it’s an expensive toy to have and sustain.  Dmitry Bazelevsky, president of the non-profit Open Basketball says annual salary budgets start at $700,000.

“Staff expenses of top teams are much higher,” says Baselevsky, a former player and coach of club Khimik Yuzhne.

In today’s globalized world, clubs hire coaches and players from the U.S., the Balkans and the Baltics, but the attitude to such policies remain controversial at home. There is some fear that Ukrainian basketball faces a stranglehold by foreigners. In 2011, the Super League increased the “legionnaire” quota to allow five foreign players on the court for a team, meaning a Ukrainian could be missing on the starting lineup.

Tymofiy Bezruk, a former basketball player turned businessman, thinks this is way too much. He says this will give Ukrainian players less playing time, and won’t promote their improvement.

“So deplorable is the decline of basketball in Ukraine,” says Bezruk. “The eloquent fact is the bad results the national team has had.”

The Super League has an explanation for why it allowed more foreigners to play: it wanted to moderate the huge appetite for money among the Ukrainian players, who are now facing a lot of competition from the foreigners.

“(The) Ukrainians wanted excessive super-salaries,” explains Volodymyr Poplavsky, the Super League’s sports director. He says that coaches also have more freedom now to manage the players. As a result, Ukrainian players get more playing time than in previous seasons.

“The main task of (the) Super League for EuroBasket 2015 is to train Ukrainian players as well as possible by giving them as much playing time as possible,” says Poplavsky.

But it’s not just the quality of players that’s a problem. Basketball hasn’t gained much in popularity to fill stadiums, which are near-empty. The bigger clubs attract between several hundreds to one thousand spectators a game. It doesn’t help that Ukraine’s main television channels refuse to broadcast basketball games, including the more competitive Euro League matches.

“Spectators are needed to be competed for,” says Bezruk, the former player. He thinks the best way to draw them is to improve the quality of play and make the game more exciting.

Bazelevsky, the former coach of Khimik Yuzhne, says Ukrainian basketball also needs advertising like in the West.  “I get [emails with] information about what team Los Angeles Lakers is going to play and when, but I don’t see posters of upcoming matches of Budivelnyk in Kyiv,” Bazelevsky complains. “How will the city know about them?”

The Super League’s Poplavsky says the organization doesn’t have the resources to advertise and recommends the clubs do instead. “But advertising costs so much that it sends club expenses through the roof, so they simply refuse to do it,”  he says.

So will the 2015 European championship bring any changes?

The proposed EuroBasket 2015 venues will be in the cities of Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk and Kyiv for the first round with Odesa, Lviv and again Kyiv hosting the second round and the Finals.

Poplavsky thinks that the Ukrainian team has great potential. “Our players are growing by gaining experience in international and domestic matches. By EuroBasket 2015 we will have an entirely new team,” says Poplavsky.

“Probably, (the) EuroBasket in Ukraine won’t be equal to the 2012 European football championship in scale, though it will be a big event,” he continues. “And it no doubt will be a new impulse, a powerful spur to our basketball – both for the clubs, and the national team.”

Kyiv Post staff writer Denis Rafalsky can be reached at [email protected].

Nov. 28 game in Kyiv between Budivelnyk and Hapoel Jerusalem at Palats Sportu at 7 p.m.

Ticket Prices: between Hr 20-50.

Tickets can be purchased at the stadium, Sportyvna Ploshcha 1 (044-360-7755), or through online ticket offices, such as: http://ua.kassir.com/kiev/203560695/218421129/  (Russian language only)

You can find a schedule of the Budivelnyk team’s games on the English language version of its website at: http://budivelnyk.ua/en/

The schedule of the Kyiv club’s matches is available at http://www.bckiev.com.ua/

A Ukrainian-language schedule of all Super League’s games with locations can be found on this site: http://www.superleague.ua/content/3664.htm.