The German U18 national team defeated Serbia in the final of the European Championships and won the first gold medal for the male junior national team.
It’s almost scary how “mad sexy” German basketball is right now… The men’s national team dominated the preliminary round with a statement win over Olympic hosts France, and the men’s national team women scored two victories in their Olympic premiere and trailed the men in the quarter-finals in Paris, where the women’s 3 × 3 formation went straight to the semi-finals thanks to a strong preliminary round, and then the male U18 selection was also crowned European champions. All this happens in four days.
The U18 team became European champions with a 93:83 final victory over Serbia, making it the first time in DBB history that a male national youth team won a major tournament. There is already a gold medal in the women’s field, and in 2018 a U18 team led by current Olympic participants Leonie Fiebich, Luisa Geiselsöder and Emily Bessoir won the gold medal at the European Championships.
Back to the present: Germany dominated the final against Serbia from the start. After five and a half minutes, the team of national coach Alan Ibrahimagic took the lead at 25:8, and in the second half the U18 boys pulled to a difference of up to 20 points. But the Serbians came back and cut their deficit to one point midway through the third period. Then it was up to point guard Christian Anderson to regain the momentum: Anderson scored twelve of the next 23 points for the German team, which got back into double digits four minutes before the end of the game. Anderson shined in the end with 31 points (10/17 FG), four rebounds and five assists, Munich winger Ivan Kharchenkov carved a triple-double with 18 points, ten rebounds and eight assists.
Anderson was named to the All-Tournament Team along with teammate Hannes Steinbach who averaged 16.2 points, 14.0 rebounds and 1.5 blocks and was behind tournament MVP Ben Saraf – the Israeli – in terms in effectiveness moves to ratiopharm ulm – in second place.