Apparently bench clearing basketball brawls aren’t just reserved for the European mainland. In the past the TheHoopDoctors.com have shown you just how fanatical and testy European players, coaches, and fans can get. Just this past Summer, more than 18 players and coaches were ejected because of a melee during the Serbian League Finals.
In a similar incident this past season, fans threw explosives on the court during the Greek League Finals in protest of some shoddy officiating. The whole incident became known as the “Night of Shame” and has appropriately given a black eye on the sport of European basketball. The incident even helped spurn the exodus of a few high level ballers from Europe to come to the States to continue their careers like Josh Childress and former European MVP Linas Kleiza.
Hard-nosed hoops action and drag-down all-out brawls are not just contained within the European mainland as I’ve stumbled onto an interesting video of professional basketball in Iceland. Yes…Iceland. Although it’s a tiny island nation off the coast of Greenland in the Northern Atlantic Ocean, it’s technically considered a part of Europe, and man-o-man do they know how to fight.
There’s actually two incidents in the video in question. In the first and during a men’s game, a player on the red team takes offense to a hard foul and rifles the ball at the player who perpetrated the foul’s head in vintage Shaq vs Barkley fight fashion.
What ensues afterwards is straight out of pro wrestling as forearm shivers and drop-kicks are exchanged before the officials can regain order. In the second, watch in the upper left corner at the 2:50 mark as a female player in the zebra striped jersey serves up a backhand to an opposing player when the referees weren’t looking. I’m just guessing but I’m guessing that all of those Subway and Coca-Cola sponsorship logos won’t be at next year’s event. The action begins at the :40 mark.
Allen Moll has been a lifelong NBA and NCAA College Basketball fan who watches and studies games religiously, and coaches youth basketball in his native Lehigh Valley region of Pennsylvania. Allen also provides content to Bleacherreport.com, Upperdeckblog.com, in addition to being a tenured NBA and NCAA columnist for TheHoopDoctors.com.
