By Nikos Varlas/ varlas@eurohoops.net
Fifteen years ago Olympiacos beat in the final of Rome Barcelona and won his only European trophy. Dusan Ivkovic was seating in the team’s bench and now the same coach doesn’t hide his ambitions for Istanbul.
Duda wants one more European title with Olympiacos and he expressed his desire in the media day of the Reds: “Everything changes in a team, but 15 years after Rome I am the coach again. I know that our fans are the best. They will be in Istanbul to support us, as they did in Rome, and I am sure that they will help us”.
The experienced coach said about Barcelona and his team: “Today starts an important week for Euroleague, for the Final Four, for the four finalists. I believe that my team will be ready. We are almost ready, we had only a little injury problem with center Lazaros Papadopoulos. It was hard for us to prepare, because we only played exhibition games last week. Now, we focus in Barcelona. We can do it and we will be ready on Friday. Barcelona has experience, but we have energy. We must be very careful in some aspects of the game, like the tempo, against the team that has the best assist/turnovers ratio in Europe. Barcelona usually has high shooting percentage and two very experienced and important players, Lorbek and Navarro. Τhere is also a play maker like Huertas, a versatile player like Eidson, Ingles and a very experienced front line, anchored by Lorbek, who is also effective from the perimeter. If we play a set game against Barcelona we will not have many chances, we will try to play a very uptempo game”.