{"id":830351,"date":"2026-09-07T23:54:22","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T23:54:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/830351\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T23:54:22","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T23:54:22","slug":"international-basketball-travel-tales-continued","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/830351\/","title":{"rendered":"International Basketball Travel Tales \u2026 continued"},"content":{"rendered":"

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TULCEA, Romania \u2014 Sneaking onto the floor at halftime to ask the visiting star for a selfie? I know we had that crazy incident during Game 1 of the NBA Finals in San Antonio when a courtside fan dangerously ran onto the wood in search of some in-game virality alongside Victor Wembanyama, but you really don’t see that too often back home.<\/p>\n

Emphasis on back home.<\/p>\n

As I was quickly reminded on a hastily assembled trip to the delightful new 5,000-seat Danubius Arena in a port city unaccustomed to hosting sporting events of significance, things can be a bit more informal in the international arena than we’re accustomed to in NBA surroundings.<\/p>\n

And that led to a scene that The Words Guy actually caught (for once) with my iPhone camera even though I didn’t quite believe what was happening: Bulgaria star Sasha Vezenkov graciously agreed to stop and pose for a few pics with giddy Romanian youngsters who interrupted his warmups before the home team was even back on the floor for the second half:<\/p>\n

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Vezenkov had 22 of his 36 points by that point in Bulgaria’s eventual 103-86 victory over Romania in a 2029 EuroBasket qualifying game that provided my own savory taste of FIBA window dressing. From Aug. 27-31, 40-ish NBA players<\/a> \u2014 along with a slew of former NBAers like Vezenkov \u2014 turned out for their national teams and provided us all with a desperately needed five-day hoops fix as we slog through a wait that still has three weeks to go for the 28 teams (all but Macao-bound Dallas and Houston) that won’t officially be back together until a leaguewide burst of Media Day activities on Sept. 28.<\/p>\n

Last Monday alone: Denver’s Nikola Joki\u0107 played through a nasty illness to captain Serbia to a gritty victory over Italy … Miami’s Pelle Larsson continued a breakout summer for Sweden with another strong game in defeat to Wemby-captained France …Philadelphia’s VJ Edgecombe (The Bahamas), new Atlanta teammates Nickeil Alexander-Walker and Lu Dort (Canada) and the LA Clippers’ Rui Hachimura (Japan) all delivered their own gaudy stat lines \u2026 and Greece managed to beat Spain in overtime without the resting Giannis Antetokounmpo.<\/p>\n

Your humble correspondent, meanwhile, was on his own little adventure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"TULCEA, Romania \u2014 Sneaking onto the floor at halftime to ask the visiting star for a selfie? I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":830352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3771],"tags":[7,920,919,329,3824,6],"class_list":["post-830351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-chicago-bulls","tag-basketball","tag-bulls","tag-chicago","tag-chicago-bulls","tag-chicagobulls","tag-nba"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/117232459454191430","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=830351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/830351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/830352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=830351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=830351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=830351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}