By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Zenit St. Petersburg won its third straight EuroLeague game by defeating Olympiacos Piraeus 84 – 78 at home. This was the first loss after three consecutive wins for Olympiacos that remains without a victory away from home.
Conner Frankamp had all of his 16 points in the first half where Zenit took a 49 – 43 advantage. Billy Baron dropped 14 points (1-7 triples), Mindaugas Kuzminskas scored 12 while Jordan Loyd finished with 12 points and five rebounds. He particularly stepped up in the fourth quarter with some key baskets that pushed Zenit towards the win.
“We had some good practices leading up, we had a really good pace about ourselves, and the guys are coming into a nice little rhythm,” Baron said. “When guys are making shots it’s tough to defend. We had a good strategy coming into the game. Olympiacos is a heck of a team, we know how good they are defensively, so we just had to be aggressive and we were able to make plays for each other. We need the fans, we missed them last year. To make the top eight in EuroLeague is really tough, every team is really tough, so we’ve got to take advantage of our home court and we need our fans here.”
Olympiacos went up 58 – 59 for its first lead in the game at the beginning of the fourth period after coming back from a nine-point deficit. Zenit responded with a 9-0 run and retained its advantage for the rest of the match. With 80 seconds to play, Baron scored for the 80 – 71 to put Zenit at a safe distance and a margin that Olympiacos couldn’t overcome.
Thomas Walkup started the game hot for Olympiacos, scoring 10 of his points in the first six minutes and finishing with 17 overall. Moustapha Fall had 13 points plus six rebounds and Kostas Sloukas posted 13 points as well. The Reds were unable to counter Zenit’s game for the majority of the match, except in the third quarter that they won 9 – 14.
“I would like to congratulate Zenit for the performance,” Olympiacos coach Giorgos Bartzokas said. “We had a poor performance defensively in the first half, and we needed much more to win this game – better defensive rebounding, more ball movement, better shooting in open shots. So finally we didn’t deserve to win. Although it was a tight game, a lot of the times we had to step up and take the lead we made silly decisions and gave Zenit the opportunity to find confidence and win the game.”
A mark of steady improvement
This win meant a lot for Zenit coach Xavi Pascual since it was another sign of his team’s growth
“It’s a game we played very well for 30 minutes,” Pascual said. “We had 11 turnovers but 7 were in the third quarter and in the third quarter we didn’t play well. We started to make turnovers, didn’t control the rhythm. We played very bad. But the rest of the game I think we deserved this win offensively and defensively, we understood what we wanted, we followed the plan and in the last quarter we finished the game. I want to congratulate the players because it’s a great win. We are making steps. At the beginning of the season nothing is ready, so every team is improving. Day by day we understand more what we want, and mentally we are more ready to follow it. Tonight we showed the team is going up but we’ll see, we have to continue.”
Photo: EuroLeague Basketball