Intensively but carefully

Official practices for Real Madrid started on Friday, August 27th, but players had already gone through a 15-day period of individual workouts with the strength and conditioning coach Juan Trapero by that time, so they are in good shape. Of course, we don’t have full squad at the moment because of the World Championship.

Anyway, after two days of physical sessions guys proceeded to work with basketballs, honing their technical skills. On September, 4th we’ll go to Valencia for our first exhibition game, four days later Real Madrid will play Khimki and after that we’ll go on to face Fuenlabrada on September, 11th. It’ll be interesting to see some familiar faces at that Khimki game, by the way. Even despite the fact that coach Scariolo will be with the Spanish National Team at the time.

On September, 15th our international players will already be back from the Worlds and we’ll head to Benidorm, a beautiful location situated close to Alicante for seven-day training camp that will include two exhibition games as well. During that camp we’ll try to put all pieces of the team together. It will be a crucial week; we have to be very careful to avoid overstressing players. Last thing we want right now is the repeat of last year’s situation when injuries piled up this exact time of year and literally killed the team. First, Darius Lavrinovic pulled a muscle, then Rimas Kaukenas went down and just eight days later Felipe Reyes suffered a very serious calf injury during an exhibition game that kept him out for about 40 days. So, we’ll stay careful this time and hope that with a little bit of luck Real Madrid will be in full shape right from day one.

The official season in Spain will start on September, 24th when four teams – Caja Laboral, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Valencia play for the Spanish Supercup in Vitoria. The first ACB League match for Real Madrid will take place on October, 3rd. It’ll be a fascinating game, partly because one of our newcomers, Sergio Rodriguez who arrived from the New York Knicks, grew up with Estudiantes, Real Madrid’s opponent in the season’s opener. Taking into account the fierce rivalry between two clubs, it’ll be very interesting to see how Sergio will fare in Real Madrid’s uniform in such atmosphere.

Besides Rodriguez, this offseason we also added D’or Fischer. The goal here was to find an intimidating presence down low and also somebody who could play alongside Ante Tomic. All in all, Fisher is a very athletic guy and a great shot-blocker.

Another newcomer, Clay Tucker, is a powerful guard with great shooting touch who can also play small forward position. And we also brought back Nicola Mirotic, a great prospect at power forward. There’s still an open spot in the roster. Right now I can not say whether we’ll fill it or not. We’ll see.