Unfinished business: Brescia's GM speaks on next season's goals and EuroCup experience / News - Basketnews.com

Marco De Benedetto, GM of Germani Brescia, spoke about the goals for the upcoming season, the unexpected return to the team of Amedeo Della Valle, and the will to be as competitive as possible in the EuroCup competition.

Credit: Germani Brescia Credit Germani Brescia

The 2021-22 season didn't begin under the best circumstances for Italian squad Germani Brescia. The team was coming from a very disappointing season, and changes had arrived in basically every department, from the coaching staff to the front office and, of course, the players.

Under the guidance of coach Alessandro Magro, Brescia lost 6 of the first 10 games in the Italian league, portending another season of meager satisfaction.

The situation, though, took an unexpected turn of events starting from Round 12. Brescia won at home 86-73 against Vanoli Cremona and after that game, the team didn't feel the taste of the defeat for the other 13 games in a row.

During the return leg of the league, Brescia lost only 2 times (against Derthona and Virtus Bologna), winning 13 out of the 15 games scheduled.

In the final part of the season, after the war in Ukraine had started, the team was also able to make a huge splash on the market, bringing back John Brown to Italian basketball, after his previous experiences with Roma, Treviso, and Brindisi.

The team became an absolute nightmare to play against, with Naz Mitrou-Long and Amedeo Della Valle becoming clearly the best backcourt of the league, and with players like Kenny Gabriel, Michael Cobbins, and John Petrucelli having a key role in the success of Germani Brescia.

Unfortunately, due to a couple of key injuries right before the beginning of the playoffs, Brescia ended up having a shorter postseason run than expected, losing 1-3 in the first round against Dinamo Sassari.

But what the Lombard club accomplished during the season cannot be erased by an unlucky playoff run. What was built last season became the ground on which the plan for this upcoming season was designed.

Michael Cobbins, John Petrucelli, Christian Burns, Kenny Gabriel, and Tommaso Laquintana all signed new contracts until 2024.

Petrucelli also received an Italian passport and after playing in an official match with the Italian national team, he's now registered as a domestic player.

Veteran David Moss also signed a contract extension until 2023. Coach Alessandro Magro extended his contract with Brescia throughout 2024.

One of the stars of last season, Naz Mitrou-Long, left the club to join EuroLeague powerhouse AX Armani Exchange Milan.

While the other main contributor of the past season, Italian guard Amedeo Della Valle, was the main actor in one of the strangest episodes witnessed on the market in recent years.

In June, Della Valle decided to exercise a clause in his multi-year deal with Brescia to get out of the contract and explore the market. He paid the clause by himself.

The feeling around the choice was that Della Valle wanted to play EuroLeague basketball and that, in the end, he would have been able to find a contract with a bigger team.

After contacts with multiple teams, including Virtus Bologna, Della Valle returned to Brescia in July to sign a new contract until 2024. A surprising and unexpected move from the player who was named MVP of the past season.

Germani Brescia will play in EuroCup this season and the team was strengthened with the additions of CJ Massinburg, Troy Caupain, Tai Odiase, David Cournooh, and Nicola Akele.

In reporting on the club's recent success, the role played by GM Marco De Benedetto cannot be overlooked.

The executive joined Germani Brescia in 2021, originally as the director of scouting. In January of 2022, he was promoted to the general director of the club, overseeing the entire technical area of the team.

At the end of the regular season, De Benedetto was voted as the best executive in the Italian league, further confirming the excellent work done by the entire team last season.

BasketNews sat down with Marco De Benedetto to talk about the upcoming season, the goals for the future of the club, and more.

We're used to seeing a lot of turnover from one season to another, but Brescia this summer was able to keep a big portion of last season's roster. Petrucelli, Cobbins, Gabriel, Burns, Laquintana, Moss, and Della Valle all stayed with the club and signed contract extensions. How difficult it was for you to keep most of the roster together?

In terms of motivations and intentions, it was really easy for us to decide that we wanted to keep most of our core together. Right after the end of the season, maybe because our season ended not like we wanted to, there was this instant reaction from the players, who showed a willingness to return and to compete again for us, because they wanted to finish what we had started. Then, of course, there was the will and the financial effort of our owner to negotiate the contract extensions.

Looking at how the roster has been built, I have the feeling that this season the team is going to have a bit more size and physicality compared to last season, and that it might be a little of a 'run and gun' squad. Is that something that you guys have planned from the start or it was the natural evolution of the market?

It's a good point. This season we'll play in EuroCup so we'll play at least 18 additional games compared to last season, so thinking of being always the team that plays the 'run and gun' style, especially for the amount of respect that we have for the competition, it would have been extremely difficult.

Trying to recreate at all costs the same type of basketball that we played last season would have forced us to be much more limited on the market. For this reason, we decided to focus more on strengthening the defensive intensity of the squad, adding more size considering that we're gonna play more games.

The general opinion about the EuroCup is that level the of the competition is gonna be lower this season, since big teams like Partizan Belgrade, Virtus Bologna, and Valencia won't be there anymore. What's your opinion about what type of competition we can see this season? Do you believe that level is going down?

I'm very respectful to the teams that are no longer in the competition but I'm also very respectful to the teams that are gonna be a part of the EuroCup this season. To be honest, if we look at our group, I mean we have Reyer Venezia, Cedevita Olimpija, Joventut Badalona, I mean there are really good teams.

I also believe that making these kinds of statements when the transfer market is not even completed yet, doesn't make much sense. I'd wait until October-November before making any real analysis of what might happen, trying to give a full answer during the summer it's not easy. One thing it's for sure: it's not going to be an easy competition. We'll do our best to be ready.

You first arrived in Brescia as the director of scouting, but then, during the season, you received a promotion and you became the GM of the team. I was curious to ask you: how much has your everyday work changed since this news? Were you forced to modify some aspects of your daily routine?

I'm definitely more tired (laughs, Ed.). I have to keep doing scouting, which has always been my core job in this industry, so I have to sacrifice hours of sleep to watch the games. But despite the title change, the club had decided to give me a certain amount of freedom in coordinating the work of the different areas of the front office already when I was the director of scouting.

It's challenging and stimulating work, but it's satisfying to see how this machine works in every department, because, especially in our club, most of the people working in the office are young and motivated, and there's a nice atmosphere.

As you said, you come from the scouting world, so I wanted to ask you something more specific about this. When you analyze the players that you're following, what type of importance do you give to the statistical aspect? How do you mix that element with the more 'classical' evaluation of a player?

When I started to work in this environment, advanced statistics weren't as common as they are right now, but I focused a lot on them, especially when I was working under coach Marco Crespi in Monferrato. So the statistical aspect is something that I brought with me always.

Over the years, though, sometimes I worked with coaches who didn't really care about that aspect, while in other situations, I worked for coaches that used to put a lot of focus on the statistical side of the game. For me, the key is to put the amount of statistics you can have into a picture that is then functional to what you're trying to do, and in order to do so, basketball knowledge is essential.

For example, having a clear picture of the difference in how basketball is played in the leagues around Europe and the rest of the world it's a key factor to give the proper value to the statistics because otherwise, you're only doing a big collection of numbers without a real value.

You mentioned the differences in how basketball is played in the leagues around Europe. I was wondering if there's a specific league you particularly appreciate when you're scouting players. Is there any domestic league that has impressed you in terms of growth in the past few years?

In the last two or three years, I have appreciated a lot what I saw in the Polish league. I believe it's a good entry-level league for the players coming from abroad, to start their careers in Europe and aim at a higher level in the future. German teams tend to often select players from the Polish league, for example.

So, personally, I believe that they're doing a pretty good job in Poland in terms of how basketball is played and in terms of selecting the right players. Then, historically, you have leagues that are always good places to find some interesting talents, like Belgium or Finland.

Among the players that were signed by the team during the offseason, there's also CJ Massinburg. He played a really good rookie season in France with Limoges and, personally, I enjoy his ability to create points and opportunities, both for himself and his teammates, without the need of having the ball too much in his hands.

I was wondering: is he a player that you have been following for a while or his addition was more the result of an opportunity that was created by the market?

I started to follow him during his college career at Buffalo, a team that had a strong defensive identity and played with a lot of intensity and energy. As you said, he had already this quality of being a productive player despite not having the ball in his hands all the time, so I was curious to see how his pro career could have developed.

In his first season in G League, he was decent but at the same time, I had very positive reviews about the kid from the people working with the Nets (Massinburg played for the Brooklyn Nets G League affiliate team, the Long Island Nets, Ed.). His approach to European basketball last season in Limoges was really interesting.

He was playing for a team that did really well, he shared the backcourt with an experienced player like Demonte Harper (Harper also signed in Italy with Derthona for the upcoming season, Ed.) and worked with a coach that I respect a lot like Massimo Cancellieri.

In such an interesting environment, he did really well so I believed he was ready to rise and do even better in the future. I felt very confident in proposing his name to the coach.

Amedeo Della Valle had decided to leave the team to pursue other opportunities, but then he returned and re-signed with the club. It was a very unique situation. How did it impact the plans that you had on the market? Did the team had already a plan B in mind?

For sure, we had different ideas in mind for a while. But since the market evolves in such a fast way, you always need to be ready for changes, opportunities, and more. You need to have not only a plan B, but also plans C, D, and more, ready to be executed. That's the nature of the business.

So adapting to the return of Amedeo is something that was almost automatic. We decided to interrupt the pursuit of other options we were following, but that doesn't mean that we cannot do something else when the season will begin.

So when Amedeo signed again, we took a break and we decided to maintain the roster in this way for a variety of reasons: balance, space, responsibility, and personal goals.

Last season Mitrou-Long was one of the main elements of the team's success. He now joined Olimpia Milan and will play in EuroLeague. Did you expect that, after just one season in Europe, he could have attracted the attention of such big teams? Were you convinced that he was destined for great success?

His speed of execution, especially when turning the corner in pick-and-roll situations, and other aspects of his game are really worth the top level of basketball in Europe, that's for sure. From a technical point of view, he's a really good player. But it's not only about that.

He has also a special attitude: he's a great guy to have around, both on and outside the court. When other teams asked for information about him, I always told them that he has a great mentality. I believe that for many EuroLeague teams, he was the type of player that was considered 'ready' to make the jump to a bigger stage.

When we signed him last summer, it was not like he was an unknown player, he had already a certain status as a very intriguing player for the European market. I think that, in the end, for us, it was a matter of timing and being able to sell him a situation in which he was going to be the guy with the ball in his hands most of the time, the real creator of the team.

After such a good season, what is the team goal for this upcoming season? Did you already have a scenario in your mind that can be considered satisfying for the club?

One of the main goals will be to be competitive in the EuroCup. Of course, being competitive doesn't mean winning the competition, but definitely, we want to be as competitive as we can in every single game, because we have a lot of respect for this tournament.

At the same time, we want to have a certain level of stability that will help us in being again among the top eight teams in the Italian league. Because if we get a spot in the playoffs, then everything can happen.

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