Ukraine - Tournament Highlights - 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup:
Ukraine forced to part with Fratello
Mike Fratello (UKR) - Mike Fratello (USA) - Head coach of Ukraine's men's national team. Finland vs Ukraine, 2014 FIBA Basketball World Cup, Bilbao (Spain), Day 2, Group phase
KIEV (EuroBasket 2015) - Ukraine will have a new coach at EuroBasket 2015 after reluctantly parting ways with Mike Fratello.
The decision was dictated by financial constraints, new Ukraine Basketball Federation president Mikhail Brodsky said.
"We expressed our deepest respect to coach Fratello and we parted as friends," Brodsky said in an interview with isport.ua.
"The board will have the first word in the matter of his successor.
"He will be a Ukrainian coach or somebody from the staff of Mike Fratello."
Kyrylo Bolshakov, Yevgen Murzin and Denis Zhuravlev, according to Brodsky, are frontrunners to take over.
The favorite may be Bolshakov, who has done a terrific job in several seasons at the helm of Ferro.
The 44-year-old Zhuravlev, a former head coach at Dnipro, has worked as an assistant to coach Fratello on the national team.
Murzin, a former Ukraine national team player, has been the head coach of Hoverla since 2009.
Fratello, who has coached the Atlanta Hawks, Cleveland Cavaliers and Memphis Grizzlies in the NBA, is equally famous for his job as a television analyst for games.
He has the nickname 'The Czar of the Telestrator'.
The announcement that Fratello will not continue has come as a blow to some of the players in the national team.
One of them, naturalized point guard Eugene "Pooh" Jeter, certainly did not expect it.
Fratello became involved with Ukraine because of his friendship with Sasha Volkov, whom he coached in Atlanta.
Volkov, who worked for several years as the president of Ukraine's Basketball Federation before just stepping down from the role, reached out to Fratello in 2010 to see if he could help the country build a solid national team program.
He was his enthusiastic supporter and the move paid dividends because the players embraced the teachings of Fratello and his staff.
After failing to get out of the opening round of EuroBasket 2011, Fratello coached Ukraine to a sixth-place finish at the tournament two years later in Slovenia and that clinched a spot in the FIBA Basketball World Cup.
Last year in Bilbao, they had a big time.
Ukraine provided the tournament with plenty of highlights.
The national team competed in Group C and put on some terrific displays but they did not advance from the Group Phase after losing a tie-breaker to the Dominican Republic and New Zealand.
At this summer's EuroBaskert, Ukraine will play in Group D against Belgium, the Czech Republic,Estonia, Lithuania and hosts Latvia in Riga.
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