By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
With Panathinaikos trailing by five, Sergio Llull had the answer with five straight points to make the score 72-61, Walter Tavares had a clutch block on Nemanja Nedovic and Real Madrid got the 76-66 win.
Llull scored six out of his total seven points in the last three minutes, Gabriel Deck put on a show with 20 points and Carlos Alocen added 13 points for the winning side which led by 20 points (49-29) at halftime.
As coach Laso said: “I have to be happy with the first half, the team played great. We moved the ball well and got open jumpers and defensively we were doing correct things on the pick-and-roll and rebounding. It was important to keep our head in the game, but they switched defense and did a lot of things to try to get us out of the game and we lost energy on offense and committed too many turnovers. I think defensively, we stayed together, but we were having problems on offense because we were not moving the ball well. We did not look fresh in the second half, but we got the victory. We probably broke the game in the first half.”
Llull was doubtful for the game almost until the last minutes before the tipoff while Nicolas Laprovitola was out with injury.
Panathinaikos which is still missing the duo of Ioannis Papapetrou and Giorgos Papagiannis, Nedovic scored 18 points and Zach Auguste had his best game yet in the season with 13. Still. the Greens were missing much more in order to be really competitive against one of the Final Four contenders.
Madrid remains fourth in the standings with a 14-8 record, while Panathinaikos has a 7-14 record. The bad news for Real Madrid is that Jaycee Carroll got injured when he landed on the foot of Panathinaikos’ guard Lefteris Bochoridis and as Laso said: “We have to wait for tests on Jaycee [Carroll] but honestly, it doesn’t look good. We have confidence that Jaycee is always capable of recovering quickly and we hope it’s nothing serious.”