Over the course of this week, Euroleague.net will be posting interviews with the Hoop District team captains
Getting to know: SBB’s Denzel, Team London captain
Artículo
14 Min lectura
With excitement levels reaching fever pitch ahead of the first edition of Hoop District, which takes place on Saturday in Paris, France, we caught up with Simply British Ballers (SBB)’s Denzel Kazembe, who will be flying the flag for Great Britain – alongside co-captain Behrad Bakhtiari – by representing Team London.
This is the fifth of six ‘getting to know’ interviews with the Hoop District captains. Here’s what we found out while speaking to Denzel.
SBB has blown up over the last year. How did it start?
“Well, SBB actually started as Behrad’s own thing. He had a YouTube channel – he was streaming [the video game NBA] 2K on there and he wanted to get some real-life basketball stuff on his channel, so I proposed the idea of rating basketball courts. I had seen a channel on YouTube called ‘Chicken Connoisseur’ and the guy used to rate chicken and chip shops out here in the UK, so I thought if you can do that, you might as well try and rate basketball courts. We didn’t have a TikTok account or anything, then our friend showed us how to use TikTok and we went out to do three courts, posted them and they all went viral. From there, we started seeing people in the comments saying to come here, come here – all these places, we had never heard of in the UK, we’d never been to them, we’d never seen them, and we immediately saw that there was a community in the UK that was wider than we had known, so we decided to try to bridge those gaps between all these communities in the UK.”
Did you guys specifically target a UK audience or something more worldwide?
“At first, it was just the basketball community in general, then we saw the demand in the UK. But as we’ve grown, we’ve started to see again that the basketball community worldwide is something that we definitely want to connect. Just like us in the UK, a lot of people didn’t even know that people play basketball in the UK or that it is a thing out here, so we want to get to more places where that’s the case, but also places where it’s established already like America, Lithuania, Serbia – just everywhere.”
How did you guys fall in love with basketball in a football-dominated country?
“There’s always the age-old story of basketball players – we start off playing football. It’s just a thing that you have to do. For me personally, I started playing football but I didn’t like the mud, I didn’t like the cold or the rain. I wasn’t with it. I was cycling through a lot of sports: tennis, cricket, handball, all outdoors. But what really brought me in was the culture. It’s the same for a lot of people – you like the shoes, you like MJ [Michael Jordan] maybe, you start watching and you have a favorite player that you like, then basketball just kind of takes over your whole life. You start dressing like a basketball player, you start watching basketball, you start thinking about basketball, and that’s how I got into it.”
SBB has grown significantly over the last year. What are your objectives for the channel moving forward?
“Like I said, we just want to continue this movement and take it everywhere we can – every nook and cranny in the world that maybe we don’t even know that there’s basketball there, we just want to get out there, see what it is and tell that story. Then the places where basketball is like a religion. One big one that we want to get to is the Philippines, for sure. We grew up on a lot of Filipino hoopers. We want to definitely bridge those gaps. Within the UK, we want to make sure we’re changing the infrastructure of basketball. We’ve been blessed enough to have people come up to us and say, ‘We’ve started playing basketball because of your videos’, which is amazing. But now we want to give those people facilities and better courts to play on. As you’ve probably seen, the courts that we have out here, some of them are crazy, man. So we definitely want to change that at its core, not just after it's done but before it's built to be able to have something in place where people can’t just do whatever they like, put whatever lines on the ground – things like that.”
Is there a particular moment that stands out on your journey so far?
“There’s been a few, there’s been a few. First of all, our first viral video, which was at Rottingdean Beach at Connor’s Court, really changed the trajectory of things for us. We realized that there was really something to hold on to. I think getting to go to the [British Basketball League] All-Star Game was amazing as well. And now here with the EuroLeague, getting to potentially win 10k [the prize for winning Hoop District]. These things are milestones for us and it’s amazing to be a part of this.”
Have any EuroLeague or EuroCup players inspired you?
“We met [Paris Basketball guard] TJ Shorts and he was around our height because we’re not the tallest guys! Just being able to see how he dominates at that position, we really look up to him as shorter guys.”
What criteria did you look for when picking your team?
“We really looked for people who can just hoop, as in really understand the game, know when to make the right passes, when to make the right reads – that’s what we were looking for. People who play basketball almost every day or on a team because you need to be in shape. I don’t know if we’re in shape, so we’ll need them to come in for us when we inevitably get winded. Ten minutes, 3x3, clock is running, there are no stops… we need a second wind, honestly.”
Which Hoop District team could be the trickiest to face?
“The one we have the most information on is Paris and they’re in our bracket. We just know that there’s a lot of hoopers out there and they’re hooping a lot, so we just know by knowledge that they’re going to be tough. Obviously Athens is in our bracket as well and we know that’s another basketball country, so a dangerous, dangerous opponent.”
What does it mean for you to be a Team Captain?
“Me and Behrad actually met on our university team and I was the team captain at that time, so it’s kind of going back to the old days. I would say he’s my co-captain now, so we’re on an equal footing, we both listen to each other, we respect each other’s game. It feels like old times to us!”