By Lefteris Moutis/ moutis@eurohoops.net
How can you avoid speaking about the pressure of the favorite. By saying that in this Final Four there are no outsider and that’s the opinion of CSKA‘s biggest star, Andrei Kirilenko.
As he said before his team’s practice: “This is a big game. This Final Four is pretty much with four equal teams. I can’t say that one team is completely better than the other team, like last year when Maccabi looked like an outsider. But the reality of the Final Four is that anything can happen, and the games last year were a great example. The best four teams right now are in Madrid. Maybe Real Madrid gets 1% more chance than everybody else because they are Madrid, but I think each team here deserves to be here and it will be very interesting matchups for the fans. Definitely, the biggest pressure is to get a win. Playing with this pressure is hard. But if you want to be the best, you got to beat the best. The best four Euroleague teams at the moment qualified for the Final Four, and if you want to be number one, you have to beat them. ”
Center Sasha Kaun added: “You always get excited before coming here. We have to finish the job and win here. I think we’re playing really good right now.The series against Panathinaikos wasn’t easy, but we managed to win it. I think we are definitely in the best shape we can be. We now have a lot more versatility and con do different things, especially with Vic [Khryapa] and Andrei [Kirilenko]. We can play with a really big lineup, we can play with a really quick lineup. It gives us different variations of the lineup depending on what the opponent is doing. Olympiacos is one of the toughest teams in the Euroleague. They make you play outside your comfort zone. They make you play a low-scoring game. It’s a matter of whether or not we can match that and play our basketball. We definitely know what they’re capable of. I’m hoping we can figure out the way to beat them. Especially for this game, the team that plays tougher, the team that wants it more will win.”