Nationalspieler Tibor Pleiß im Interview

heinnews’ David Hein took a trip up to Bamberg to talk to young German basketball national team center Tibor Pleiss from Brose Baskets Bamberg. They discussed Pleiss’s eventful summer; what he learned from playing against players like Sofoklis Schortsanitis; the insolvency of Köln 99ers; Germany’s new regulations for German players; and the NBA as a goal for the future.

heinnews: Tibor, you have been in Cologne for the past three years, what’s it like now in Bamberg?
Pleiss: I’m just getting used to things here. Of course it’s a pretty big change since the city is quite a bit smaller than Cologne. But it’s a classy team and I think I will fit in just fine. And I think we will have a very good season.

heinnews: Let’s go back to this summer. You had a pretty event time with the U20 European Championship in Rhodes and then the German senior team training camp as well as making the EuroBasket 2009 squad. Start with the U20s, the team came in with high expectations - possibly even of reaching the semis - but ended up fighting off relegation. What did you think about the U20s this summer?
Pleiss: We had a really good team. And we thought we had real chances of reaching the semi-finals. But every team had a way they could beat us. So it was basically a 50-50 chance each time out. We lost the first two games really close - the first one in overtime to Croatia and the second at the buzzer to Serbia. And that kind of hurt our mentality and our motivation since we knew we couldn’t reach the next round. We thought we should have gone a lot further and then we lost another game and ended up just barely staying in Division A.

heinnews: You had helped Germany get promoted to Division A the summer before. And the team came in with such high expectations, how important was at least avoiding relegation?
Pleiss: It was very important. We had a good success with the promotion. And then we thought we are in a pretty good spot and I think we put ourselves under a lot of pressure. So I was really happy that we ended up getting it done in the end.

Zum kompletten Interview.