Keith Langford's opinion |
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Hi everybody, Everyone starts off their blogs by saying hello and introducing themselves, but I wanna start by giving a shout out to all my teammates from khimki! Today we played a vtb cup game in Latvia and despite all the clouds of negativity hanging around the team, I was extremely proud of our guys and the coaching staff for being incredibly positive and getting a win during a crucial time in our season. Only bad thing is I re-sprained a nagging ankle injury that's been bothering me, but today was still very encouraging! Hopefully by wednesday I will have worked with our team doctors enough to be ready for Partizan which I must say will be a big time game in a big time atmosphere!  When I was asked to blog about a week ago, I really didn't know what I would write about, but I wrote for my college newspaper and was a journalism major so I was excited to see if I still had my skills! A lot of you that follow Coach Scariolo may know more about him than the Khimki team itself. I want to start by saying that as an organization, the one thing you have to appreciate is the ambition of the team. They always try and put together a good roster with very good goals for the season. Last year I think we overachieved in the minds of a lot of people in Europe and I think this year we have to learn to play with expectations. We have experience, size, athleticism, and a good coach which are all important ingredients for winning at a high level. Secondly I want to say that this club has the "potential" to be a perennial force in European basketball. I say potential because obviously these things take time. Its also been a pleasure to realize my own potential while growing at the same time with this club.If I could describe our season so far, I would say it has been long! We played very many games in the preseason, the euroleague qualifying round and now we play in 3 separate european competitions! Its fun to play so many games, believe me I would rather play than practice but sometimes the mind can trick the body into feeling tired. At this point in the year we have to continue to learn to play together, stay in shape and fight until the very last minute of every game of every competition. Like my college coach used to say, "the dictionary is the only place where success comes before work!"- Roy Williams. With that being said I encourage everyone not to count khimki out in the euroleague or any competition for that matter. Our teams best basketball is ahead of us and no one can win a championship in december. As for me, hopefully I will be able to continue to write for this site and give everyone a good feel for myself and the guys on the team. It would be cool to profile a couple of the guys in the blogs and give some interesting insight to how we all operate. This week is incredibly important for a lot of reasons and I'm not into making promises, but I can guarantee that our team will respond to the challenge ahead! So everyone stay tuned and in the words of my man Terrell Owens, "get your popcorn ready!" Take care, Keith |
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