12 days of basketball – Final verdict

So – the travels are behind me, and safely home and ready for the return to usual grind here in Finland, what do I take away from the last 12 days or so??

First of all, it has sort of reminded me why I fell in love with covering the sport of basketball – it is so different everywhere you go. The game might be the same, but venues, crowds, entertainment, atmosphere.. it is all so different in every town, league, country..

Nowhere did I understand what was being said by the announcers – which actually makes the games MUCH more fun, you do not have to understand what is being said, just the tone of voice is kinda enough.

And the lights at the venues – don’t get me started!! Why the HECK can’t the venues in Finland install proper lights!!! Whole 12 days – well, apart from last stop in Treviso – I was shooting at ISO 800 or there abouts, now I go back to the Finnish league and look at ISO4000.. goodbye clean looking images 🙁

Would I do this trip again in the same way?? Probably not, it was super to have a quick tour of so many teams/players/countries – but not enough time to spend with the players to have a proper interview/chat or take outside of the game images (maybe next time!).

How about the little conclusions of the travels :

Best Flight : Helsinki-Munchen – just has to be as it was upgraded, so no contest here. But all flights were on time, etc – so that was great.

Worst Flight : Munchen-Porto – was ‘auto checked-in’ and received a middle seat for the longest flight of the trip – not a happy bunny 🙁

Best bed : The hotel in Venice – definitely had the best bed, pillow and room temperature!!

Worst temperature in hotel : Probably all apart from the last one in Venice – people in Central Europe seem enjoy having hotel room temperatures set to +32 celsius 😉 And the aircon really didn’t do that much to help it…

Best food : Not really anywhere to be honest, probably the Franchesinha in Porto..

Worst food : Any time I had to have a burger or similar.

Best game : Uuuh, this is a tough one – all were great in one way or another, if I would have separate one – probably the one in Crailsheim. But really – all were just great events to be able to photograph, so no complaints at all!

Best rental car : The one in Hungary, drove about 450km and only used 6 litres of petrol (it was hybrid).

Best dance crew : Once again, lots of great stuff, but just because they’ve been most active on Social Media – I’ll have to give this to Puppets Family in Treviso, Italy.

Best walk : One in Porto was nice, as it was sunny and I had some time, the walk near Tübingen was great as there was a forest, and one in Venice nice as it was sunny and open fields.

Best photopositions : Porto or Levice – no LEDs on the baseline – so could shoot while sitting on the floor.

That is it for now – if I come up with more ‘awards’ – I will come update this post in the coming days 🙂

It was fun to keep up the Blog, and in few years time I will have a good laugh looking at these texts. On average, there was about 5-8 visitors to the Blog most days – never really went over 10 per day, happy with that even someone was bothered to visit the Blog and just shows that writing about Finnish basketball might not be something that one can make a living out of 😉