By Lefteris Moutis/ moutis@eurohoops.net
In Malik Hairston’s face, Milan will try to establish a new era after its Euroleague failure and the roster changes (departures of Hendrix, Cook and the addidition of Bremer). Since Friday morning he’s the new captain, but last week he talked to Eurohoops about what happened in the regular season of Euroleague and what’s next.
“We struggled most of the times, but we have to get better and especially in the finishing of the games. I think we began to get better when the half way went through. We began to focus more on defense but we should do that earlier during the season. We still look for the rest of a far season” said Hairston about the reasons for the disappointing Euroleague season of his team after the last regular season game against Olympiacos.
Will the European results give a bigger motivation for him and the team for the Italian championship and Cup? “These goals are also a big motivation for us. We just need to focus how to get better as a team”. So, what should be the main change in the team? “I don’t necessarily know if we need to change something. We just need to get better, fix a few things mostly defensively and to work on our chemistry”.
But why Milan failed? Eurohoops gives its opinion…
Wrong basketball path…
By Nikos Varlas/ varlas@eurohoops.net
In modern basketball individual talent and one-on-one ability is not enough in order for a team to achieve greatness in the highest level. You also need role players, personalities that know they should put their ego under the common good and do the little things in order to upgrade the team’s quality and efficiency.
In Milan Sergio Scariolo didn’t wanted to change his team’s mentality and profile, he continues to bet on the presence of many capable scorers in his roster, but none of them is putting the team above all and that’s way EA7 Euroleague failure was thunderous.
“We lost four games in the last seconds and the last three of them in the last shot”, stated Scariolo after his team missed the Top16. What he didn’t say? In most of those cases, the ball was in the hands of Keith Langford and he was asked to make the last second decision.
Langford is a gifted scorer, but not a player capable of setting up his teammates and making his team better. The distance between being a scorer and an all around guard who can improve the other players is the distance Milan has to cover in order to evolve from a good team to a championship team.
If Milan doesn’t change dramatically its approach in creating a team, adding players who could give balance in its roster, then it will be very difficult to chase the return to the top of Legabasket for the first time since 1996…
What EA7 Milano did after the Top16 disqualification? They showed the exit door to their only prolific creator on the court, Omar Cook, and also to Hendrix who couldn’t contribute in Scariolo’s system! They added once more J.R.Bremer and they are still in the market. We could be wrong, but it seems that EA7 Milano continues to follow the wrong path…
If the decision of releasing Omar Cook was based only in basketball criteria, then the problem for this historic Italian club with a great basketball tradition will not end.