The day before he leads his team into a clash with Partizan in Belgrade, Aaron Harrison of Turk Telekom Ankara unveils his new Eurocupbasketball.com blog.
Aaron Harrison, Turk Telekom: 'We have a great chance'
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After a couple of seasons away, Turk Telekom Ankara is back in the 7DAYS EuroCup and the team signed scoring guard Aaron Harrison to be one of its leaders. Harrison was a college basketball star at the University of Kentucky and led the Wildcats to back-to-back NCAA Tournament Final Fours alongside his twin brother, Andrew Harrison, who now plays professionally in China. After three seasons in the NBA and the G League. Harrison joined Galatasaray Istanbul and was the fifth-best scorer in the 2019-20 EuroCup with 15.9 points per game. He made his Turkish Airlines EuroLeague debut with Olympiacos Piraeus last season and is now back in Turkey and the EuroCup to lead Turk Telekom's backcourt. This season, Harrison will share some of his thoughts with the fans via his Eurocupbasketball.com blog.
This is my first blog entry so I will tell you a bit about myself. My career is going pretty good. I had an up and down season last year with Olympiacos. I think it was just a tough year, my role wasn't really specific. I didn't really ever get comfortable in my role last year. It was just a tough year, but it's okay, I still enjoyed it. I have enjoyed my last few years playing in Europe. I had some great years with Galatasaray and I'm going to have a great year now, so I'm just enjoying it so far. Before that, I played the NCAA Final Four with Kentucky before starting my professional career. Of course, that's an experience that I'll never forget. The NCAA tournament is huge. We had great teams and we made great runs.
I joined Turk Telekom Ankara this year along with other players like JaJuan Johnson, Alex Perez and myself, guys who know what it takes to play in the EuroLeague, the EuroCup and the Turkish League. It's always important to know the physicality, the level of competition and sign people that have knowledge of playing in Turkey and playing at high levels in European competitions. I think that was really important. And I think that's why we're going to do well and even much better than people expect us to do. We don't need adjustment to the country and it makes it a little easier. Ankara is not as upbeat and there is not as much going on as in Istanbul, but it has the same kind of culture and I'm very comfortable here. That makes everything a lot easier. The traffic's not as bad, it's easier to get around. The city is not as big.
"We're going to do well and even much better than people expect us to do."
I played with Octavius Ellis in Olympiacos last season and Turk Telekom signed us both, which is great. He plays really hard, I love cheering for him. I love seeing him do well and he's a good friend of mine. I'm happy for him. He played really well in our first EuroCup game and he also played well the game before that. I'm just happy for him. He scored a lot of layups. I think he just focused on finishing through contact and just wanted to finish the play.
We won our first EuroCup game against Metropolitans, which is a talented team. But I think we just played together more, we wanted to win more than they did. On defense, we just got tougher and tougher; we are just a tough team. Even most of the comeback, I wasn't even out there, actually. The rest of the team just stepped up. I didn't really play well offensively in this game and Alex Perez really stepped up a lot. Octavius stepped up a lot, too, and we figured out the win. It was a big first one for us and we're going to take it and move on to the next game and just keep getting better and better.
Our next game is against Partizan in Belgrade. That's one of the games that I have on my list. That's the type of game that I live for. I am just really excited to go out there and be able to be in that type of atmosphere and play against a great coach like Zeljko Obradovic. But we are definitely coming with our A-game. We are going to come and play as hard as we can and fight them until the end of the game. I am excited to play against Kevin Punter. I obviously think I'm the best. It is not a personal thing. Of course, he's a great player, but I definitely think I'm the best. I definitely think that. It's not about me, but I will just go out there with a little extra motivation and try to go out there and get a win.
We feel like we have a great chance to do well as a team. I think we all have a chip on our shoulders, but we also are out there to win. We did have tough seasons last year, but I think we are all still confident. I know that we all want to have a redemption season and the only way to do that is to win. I mean, I have confidence. That doesn't really affect me, having a tough season last year. I'm fine, I'm still confident, and I want the guys on our team just to be confident like Alex was last week. Alex had an amazing game. He really carried us. That comes from being hungry and I think that is going to help us because if we weren't hungry, we probably wouldn't have won that game against Metropolitans.
"We all want to have a redemption season and the only way to do that is to win."
Finally, I want to say that I think the new EuroCup format is great. It is completely like the NCAA set-up and I am looking forward to playing 18 regular-season games, just because we have more chances to prove ourselves than previous years in the EuroCup. So I'm excited about that, for my personal reasons and for the team. And I think we're going to surprise a lot of people this year because we are talented at every position. We have two people at every position, maybe three that can go out there and compete. I think that with the 18-game schedule, everyone's going to be able to showcase their talent and how they can help the team, so we can all go and accomplish what we want to accomplish.
Home-court advantage should be very important, but arriving at the most decisive games in the right shape is even bigger. At the end of the day, it's about how the team is playing at the time. We're going to fight for home-court advantage. We're going to fight to have the best record possible and then going to go out there and keep fighting, home or away. You can be playing the best team or the worst team. If it's one game, anything can happen. So you have to be mentally ready.