By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Kevin Punter scored a career-high-tying 24 points including the go-ahead basket to lead Crvena Zvezda to a 78 – 73 win over Panathinaikos Athens at home. The Serbian side snapped a four-game skid to improve to 10 – 13.
DeShaun Thomas missed in his game-tying 3-point attempt with five seconds remaining and the “Greens” suffered their second straight loss and 10th in 23 games this season in EuroLeague.
“Like I said, we got to stay with it, stay locked in and that’s what we did. We had to. We had to protect the home court,” Punter said to EuroLeague TV after the match.
Punter drained the 3-pointer off an offensive rebound for the 74 – 73 with 52 seconds remaining following a Red Star comeback from 10 points down (55-45) in the fourth period. The American guard also scored a free throw after a technical foul on Rick Pitino and then Nick Calathes misfired in a 3-point attempt.
Panathinaikos got the offensive rebound but Charles Jenkins pulled off a big defensive play on Jimmer Fredette to force a key turnover. Jimmy Baron’s free throw put the hosts up by three and after Thomas’ failed triple, Punter added a pair from the line.
Thomas and George Papagiannis dropped 12 points apiece for Panathinaikos. The latter also had five rebounds. Fredette scored all of his 11 points in the second half to push his team towards recovering the lead after falling behind 35 – 32 at halftime. The visiting squad had been up 14 – 27 in the second quarter.
Former Panathinaikos player Stratos Perperoglou contributed 12 points to Red Star his first EuroLeague game since November. Panathinaikos guard Nikos Pappas had 10 points in his return to action after a a two-month absence.
“I feel great. We really wanted this win, especially with this [schedule] that we have to play a lot of important games. This one is not looking like it was that important, but we really wanted to win this game, because I think we probably deserved one more before,” Crvena Zvezda coach Dragan Sakota said.
“Unimpressed”
That was the word for Panathinaikos coach Rick Pitino after seeing his team getting beaten two times in a row.
“In the last few games that we played, I was very unimpressed, even though we won one of them,” Pitino said in the post-game presser. “Tonight, I think we played well on defense. We held them to 5-of-19 from three, 26%, 46% from the two. We rebounded the basketball well and played with a good effort except one thing that you cannot do is turning the ball over on the road. It was 18-8 turnovers. I think that we had a really bad break tonight because our starting small forward [Ioannis Papapetrou] got hurt, our backup power forward [Wesley Johnson] fouled out and we had to go with somebody that didn’t know their position down the stretch and that really hurt us. Red Star made big shots down the stretch. There are a lot of us that are not in the top four that are going to fight for their playoffs life. We have to keep on fighting and get better.”
Photo: EuroLeague Basketball