Last year Johannes Thiemann moved from Alba Berlin to Japan. Since then he has lived an exciting but not always easy basketball adventure. The European Championship leads him back to the usual realm.
With great steps and a grin on the face, Johannes Thiemann will be strolled over the floor of the training hall in Riga in Latvian on Tuesday evening. A few of his national team colleagues are still throwing, a couple have already exchanged their basketball shoes for flip -flops.
Thiemann is at least finished with the first. His work before the German EM quarter-finals against Slovenia (from 8 p.m. in the live ticker of the sports show) is done. Now Thiemann has time for a short conversation. “It is always cool to come to the national team,” he says, adding: “I am happy to speak German again and to play with boys that I have known forever.” It is a strong contrast to the still unusual everyday life that the 31-year-old has lived in Japan since last summer.
Hype, money and culture
After over half a decade and exactly 359 games in the jersey of Alba Berlin, Thiemann moved to the Gunma Crane Thunder in the city of ōta, which was characterized by a lot of industry. Between Japanese characters, excursions to Tokyo and polite, but numerous fans on photo hunt, he experienced an exciting and challenging first year.
At the start, Thiemann, in addition to a growing basketball hype in Japan and an exceptionally lucrative contract, also explicitly performed Japanese culture as a reason for his move to Asia. “To deal with the culture is super exciting,” he says a year later. Thiemann tells of exploration tours on extended away trips and reports regular excursions into Tokyo, which is around two hours away, on game -free days.
“It is fun to learn to understand the country,” he says. Understanding in the linguistic sense is one of the greatest challenges in Japan – with far -reaching consequences. “Especially in the city in which I live, almost nobody speaks English,” says Thiemann. This applies-with the exception of two Americans-even to which most of his Japanese teammates. What is unthinkable in European basketball means in Japan that Thiemann’s everyday life is “a bit more isolated” off the hall.
Big in Japan
The contrast program is the numerous fans who ask Thiemann for photos and autographs when he moves through ōta. Unlike in Berlin, where Alba’s basketball players remain largely undetected in everyday life, Thiemann is a star. He is a star who is noticeably happy about the full Japanese halls and the appreciation of his fans. But he is also a star who now has to deal with the fact that simple supermarket visits take on new, sometimes also strenuous time dimensions.
Overall, despite all the challenges in Japan, he usually feels very comfortable, says Thiemann. That is why he decided this summer not to pull the exit clause in his contract-although there was definitely contact and interest from Euroleague clubs, as he says. That is not surprising, after all, Thiemann has lost nothing of his sporting quality in Japan.
The Thiemannschen Core competencies
And even at this year’s European Championship, Thiemann has become even more important after the injury -related failure of Center Johannes Voigtmann. So far, he was on the floor for almost 17 minutes at the tournament per game. The Thiemann core competencies are unchanged: clever and physical rebound work as well as excellent and energetic defense on the edge of the zone and in the pick & roll.
In addition, there are the offensive splashes of color, which Thiemann regularly gives the very versatile, colorful offensive game of the German game in the form of his virtuoso post moves. They have not only inspired the German basketball fans for years, but also Patrick Femerling. The German record national player was once a power on the edge of the zone, today he accompanies the European Championship as a TV expert.
“He has an incredible calm and a very good feeling for the opponent,” says Femerling about Thiemann. It is particularly impressive. “If you have your opponent in your back, you can’t see him. You have to feel it, read the pressure and use it for yourself,” says Femerling, “he is doing that really well.” Both in Japan and at the European Championship in his well -being oasis national team.
