Alexander Olegowitsch Kaun

Sasha Kaun
Player information
Full name	Alexander Olegowitsch Kaun
birthday	8th May 1985 (age 35)
place of birth	Tomsk , RSFSR , Soviet Union
size	211 cm
position	center
college	Kansas
NBA draft	2008 , 56th Pick Seattle SuperSonics
Clubs as active
2004–2008 Kansas Jayhawks ( NCAA ) 2008–2015 PBK CSKA Moscow Since 2015 Cleveland Cavaliers 0
National team
2008-2015	Russia

Alexander Olegowitsch Kaun medal table
Basketball (men)
Russia
Olympic games
bronze	2012 London

Alexander Olegowitsch Kaun ( Russian Александр Олегович Каун ; born May 8, 1985 in Tomsk , Russian SFSR ) is a former Russian basketball player . Sasha Kaun , as it is called in the English language, studied in the United States and won with the Jayhawks of the University of Kansas , the US NCAA Division I Basketball Championship he 2008. Then played in his homeland for the dominant Russian basketball club PBK CSKA from Moscow .

With the Russian national team he won a bronze medal at the 2012 Olympics . After winning various titles with CSKA Moscow, Kaun also won the championship in the most highly endowed professional league NBA at the end of his career in 2016 with the Cleveland Cavaliers .

college

Kaun completed a year of "preparation school" Florida Air Academy in Melbourne (Florida) and was founded in 2004 to study at the University of Kansas in Lawrence (Kansas) was added, where he worked for the renowned University Team Jayhawks , for even Wilt Chamberlain during had played in NCAA Division I.

In his first year he played with Keith Langford , who would later also play professional basketball in Russia. In the first two seasons of Kaun they were eliminated somewhat surprisingly in the first two rounds of the national finals. From 2006 to 2008 they won the championship in the Big 12 Conference before the start of the national finals . In 2007 they were eliminated in the quarter-finals just before reaching the Final Four tournament. In 2008 they reached the Final Four, beating the higher-rated Tar Heels of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Tigers of the University of Memphis in succession .

A total of five players on the winning team, including Final Four-Most Outstanding Player Mario Chalmers , were then selected by clubs in the top-endowed professional league NBA in the 2008 Entry Draft . Kaun himself was selected in 56th position by the Seattle SuperSonics . This was a historic pick in that it was the last draft pick of the franchise as SuperSonics. The club was then transferred to Oklahoma City in the neighboring state of Kansas as Thunder .

Russia

In the summer of 2008 Kaun was with the Russian national team, but ultimately had to vacate his place in the Olympic squad for Wiktor Chrjapa . Instead of the NBA, he then signed a contract in his Russian homeland with the dominant basketball club PBK ZSKA from Moscow . The club was subsequently able to defend its Russian championship title. In the highest European club competition ULEB Euroleague 2008/09, however, failed to defend the title when they were narrowly inferior to Panathinaikos Athens in the final . Kaun himself was used as a supplementary player for a good five minutes per game and had most of his playing time in the final with just under 13 minutes. Shortly before the start of the 2009 European Championship finals , he had to cancel his participation due to an injury.

In his second season at CSKA he was a regular 20 minutes per game and was in the ULEB Euroleague 2009/10 player in the starting five . In addition to the Russian championship, they won the first regular staging of the Eastern European VTB United League . At the Final Four of the Euroleague, after a semi-final defeat against eventual title winners FC Barcelona, ​​they finished third with a win in extra time in the small final over KK Partizan Belgrade . Partizan's long-time coach Duško Vujošević then became a coach at CSKA.

At the 2010 World Cup , Kaun was in the final squad of national coach David Blatt . They initially won all games except for a group defeat against hosts Turkey . In the quarter-finals, they lost to eventual world champions United States and finished seventh after the placement round, in which Kaun no longer played after an injury. Kaun himself continued to struggle with injury problems at the beginning of the 2010/11 season and only played games in the Russian championship and the VTB league, as the ULEB Euroleague 2010/11 was surprisingly eliminated in the preliminary round and not that for the first time in nine years Final Four tournament in this competition, which resulted in the expulsion of coach Vujošević. In the final of the VTB United League 2011 they lost just two points to the Russian runner-up BK Chimki , who could be defeated again in the final series of the Russian championship.

At the end of the season, Kaun had to cancel participation in a European Championship finals again due to an injury due to a necessary operation. At the 2012 Olympic Games, Kaun was again in the squad of the Russian national team. He completed an average of almost 20 minutes per game and won the bronze medal with the team. After he announced the end of his European career in the summer of 2015, he signed a two-year contract with the Cleveland Cavaliers in August .

Achievements and Awards

• Winner NCAA Championship 2008
• Russian champion (5 ×): 2009–2013
• Russian cup winner: 2010
• VTB United League winner : 2010, 2012–2015
• Bronze medalist Olympic Games 2012
• MVP of the month October 2013 in the VTB United League
• NBA Champion : 2016

Web links

• Sasha Kaun - player profile on basketball-reference.com
• KAUN, SASHA - Player profile on the website of the Euro League (English)
• Alexander Olegowitsch Kaun - Overview of participation in international FIBA tournaments on archive.fiba.com (English)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Latest News - Olympic Basketball Men Roster. (No longer available online.) Sports-Express.ru, July 28, 2008, formerly in the original ; accessed on October 30, 2011 (English).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  
2. ↑ Basketball: No Khryapa And No Kaun At Eurobasket. (No longer available online.) SportsExpress.ru, September 7, 2009, formerly in the original ; accessed on October 30, 2011 (English).  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  
3. ↑ CSKA: Kaun out with knee injury. ULEB Euroleague , October 25, 2010, accessed October 30, 2011 . 
4. ^ Injured Kaun will not make it on time. FIBA Europe , August 2, 2011, accessed October 30, 2011 .