By Lefteris Moutis / moutis@eurohoops.net
Olympiacos will host Barcelona at SEF aiming to get two wins and qualify, while the Catalans need at least one win to take the series back to Barcelona. How did the two teams react when they were in a similar situation in the past?
The character of a team and their mentality, comes through when the going gets tough: when the situation is tight and the mental readiness is perhaps even more important than the competitive one.
So, what did Barcelona do when they lost one of the two first games at home and were forced to “respond” with a break? The Catalans won two games in a row in Madrid in the 2009-10 season against Real and got a 3-1 lead! A year earlier, the Blaugrana had won one game against Tau, took the series to a fifth game and defending a home advantage, got the qualification for the Final Four. In the 2010-11 season the Catalans lost from Panathinaikos in the second showdown in Barcelona and carried on… in the same vein by losing the next two games at OAKA to the greens.
Finally, in the 2012-13 season against Panathinaikos once again, the Blaugrana lost in the Palau but won the fourth game at OAKA and qualified thanks to their win in the fifth game in Barcelona. So, then, three times Barcelona responded excellently and succumbed once when they lost the home advantage.
Respectively, what did Olympiacos do in a previous break in the Euroleague playoffs? The red-and-whites found themselves in a similar situation once before, in 2012 when they beat Siena and then got two wins at SEF and qualified for the Final Four in Istanbul.