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Can Sabonis handle the Frenchmen alone?

France took the silver medal with this generation two years ago, and they're hoping they could get far this time as well, but they'll need a win against Lithuania, led by great Sabonis

France are the vice-champions of the world in this generation and that says enough. Their teams are always physically powerful, strong in the air, dominant, and they make good use of that to gain advantage in younger categories. This generation also plays a very intelligent basketball, so one might say they are not a classic French team.

The team is lead my minute point guard Ory, who's their mastermind and had the most assists on the aforementioned competition. Next to him we have sharpshooting Doussoulier, and that's about it in terms of creativity. The rest of their team are physically strong players and they have a wide array of forwards and  power forwards who will dominate most of the teams.

One such player is Elizier Venerot, who announced this competition from the French perspective:

- This will be a very difficult competition with lots of good teams and I think Croatia are the best one. Everyone knows that Lithuania are always dangerous and we are facing a difficult task.

It seems incredible, but there is a chance for France to go into the next round without a single point. Croatia are definitely stronger than them and they will look for their chance against Lithuania today.

Lithuania are renowned for their great school of basketball and almost all of their generations have a medal or two from youth competitions. That's what makes the poor performances of this generation, led by Domantas Sabonis, all the more shocking. At the U-16 championship played two years ago, Lithuania ended up as the eleventh-placed team and one has to wonder how they would end up had Sabonis not been so dominant in the paint then.

Sabonis will be their main star here as well as no one can defend against him. His usual output is 15+15 and he got a monstrous total of 27 rebounds against Poland in the aforementioned EC. Suffice to say he'll help his team keep up with France's physical dominance.

During the preparation games, we saw Lithuania play low-scoring games against Latvia, which is very unorthodox for their style of basketball, but we've already said that this generation is not as talented as previous ones so that should be one of the main reasons.

A good indicator of how small the differences in quality in these generations are is the fact that Lithuania beat France at the EC two years ago and ended up as the 11th team while France took the silver. 

I think the odds here are set wrong and only due to results of these two teams from two years ago, and not due to quality of these teams. France won the silver medal on that tournament while Lithuania ended as the eleventh-placed team. However, Lithuania won the head-to-head then and the reason is simple - Domantas Sabonis. The Lithuanian tower is so powerful in the block and rebounds that he closes down the paint and we know France don't win games with perimeter shots. That's what I expect today and I think Lithuania will do much better than two years ago. This is at least a 50-50 game, and I would personally put Lithuania as the favorites.