Germany has finished the best group stage in the history of the German Basketball Federation (DBB). With five wins from five games, the team led by Dennis Schröder and Franz Wagner broke records that will go down in European Championship history.
It was a good week, worthy of a world champion. Germany won all its games by at least 19 points, and on three occasions outclassed its opponents by 30 points or more.
The offense was in particularly good form. In all five games, the team scored at least 90 points, and in four of them even more than 100. The DBB team also had only one quarter in which they did not score 20 points (in the third quarter against Finland, they scored “only” 19). On average, they outscored their opponents by 32.8 points, a performance surpassed only by Yugoslavia in the preliminary round in 1969.
In this century, only Spain came close to these figures eight years ago (29.2 PPG), and the Iberians went on to win the title. On average, Germany scored 105.8 points, which has only been surpassed in European Championship history by the Soviet Union in 1985 (107.4 PPG).
DBB team dominates the tournament
Against Finland, the team also showed its defensive qualities. The team collected a total of ten blocks, a feat achieved in the 21st century only by Poland (against Bulgaria in 2009) and Spain (against France in 2011).
In addition, the Germans are the only team to have two players, Franz Wagner (ranked 5th) and Dennis Schröder (7th), who score over 20 points per game and are thus ranked in the top 10 in the tournament.
Apart from Germany, only Turkey remains undefeated, but they are nowhere near the Germans’ statistics. Germany has a net rating of 43.4 over the group stage, and also has by far the best offense (140.7 offensive rating) and the third-best defense after Spain and Greece in the entire competition.
