Starting with Damir Markota, who missed our top-5 by a hair, this young Croatian has enjoyed a breakthrough season. Coming off the bench, he established himself as the top frontcourt scorer for Cibona while decisively helping his team advance to the Top-16 stage. Olympiacos is another team still in the competition, with Panagiotis Vasilopoulos and Renaldas Seibutis, both newcomers in the Euroleague, certainly contributing to their teams success with solid displays, providing excellent depth to the Greek roster. It was a different situation for Uros Tripkovic and Kosta Perovic. Both were meant to have a very significant role in Partizan (particularly Tripkovic) and they left a certain degree of disappointment, on par with the Serbian team, once again unable to escape from mediocrity. Finally, Marko Tomas and his inconsistent performances for Real Madrid puts an end to this coverage.
Damir MARKOTA
Cibona Zagreb; 1985; PF; 6-11; 22.3 mpg, 9.3 ppg, 5.7 rpg
by Kristian Hohnjec
In the latter stages of the regular season Markota suffered through some minor injuries that may have cost him a spot amongst the top-5. His game suffered, but he was still able to put in some decent efforts and participate in Cibona Zagrebs qualification for the next phase of Euroleague competition.
Damir started the season red-hot from behind the three-point line, leading the Euroleague in 3-point percentage for the first couple of weeks. Since then he cooled off and missed 20 of his last 26 attempts from downtown. He showed a little more versatility in his offensive game lately, but still scores mostly with outside jumpers. Markota attacked the basket more aggressively in the second part of competition and even showed some post game, but not consistently enough. He will need to work on his ball-handling skills hard this summer, because this could open up a whole another dimension to his game, as he can blow by most Euroleague power forwards with his speed.
Defensively, he improved on the glass, boxing out better and increasing his rebounding numbers. He still makes some foolish mistakes on defensive rotations and finds himself out of position from time to time, but is consistently improving in this area and is on the way to becoming a pretty solid defender. Some doubts about his NBA position seem to be resolved this season, as it has become clear that he is incapable of defending perimeter players due to his lateral quickness not being up to par with his other physical gifts. He will definitely be a power forward in the NBA and in order to enjoy some success there will obviously need to add bulk to his skinny frame.
Markota can be happy with the level of performance he exhibited this season, being back on the NBA radar after a year and a half of decline. If he decides to put his name in the draft in June, barring dramatic improvement in the last few months of the season Markota should be picked somewhere between the late first and early second round.