By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Crvena Zvezda became the first team to beat Olympiacos in Piraeus this EuroLeague season. The Serbian team escaped Peace and Friendship arena with a 74 – 70 win, a result that marked the hosts’ first loss at home after nine victories in 2021-22, 10 including the previous campaign.
Zvezda went back to wins after a loss to ASVEL Villeurbanne and improved to 8-12. Olympiacos fell to 12-8 and below the Top 4 after a third defeat in a row.
Ognjen Dobric led Zvezda with 14 points, including the dagger-dunk for the 67 – 74 in transition with 42 seconds to play. This basket capped a key 0 – 6 run by Red Star in a moment when Olympiacos was trying to take the lead but was unable to even tie the match.
“It’s always a pleasure to play against big teams, like Olympiacos,” Nikola Kalinic said. he contributed 12 points, five rebounds and four assists to Zvezda’s win.”I think we played good, we fought, we played a physical game and we got the win. We had some hard losses lately. Especially, I was missing some important shots, free throws and everything, but managed to bounce back, finally. We keep fighting for the playoffs.”
Olympiacos, that was missing Kostas Papanikolaou, Shaq McKissic and Giorgos Printezis, was trailing for most of the second half after going up 39 – 37 early in the third quarter. Zvezda took a 42 – 50 advantage and held on, repelling their opponents each time they got at a shooting distance.
With the score 57 – 65, Kostas Sloukas made a 3-point play, Giannis Larentzakis added a triple and Sasha Vezenkov hit a floater for a 8 – 1 run that put Olympiacos at a one-point distance. Moustapha Fall made it 67 – 68 but Aaron White and Luka Mitrovic combined for four unanswered points. Fall tried to tip the ball to his teammates after a missed 3-point shot by Vezenkov but it landed on rival hands and Dobric sealed Zvezda’s win.
Vezenkov led Olympiacos with 20 points while Sloukas dropped 18 points, 11 of them in the last period.
“It was a good game for us on both ends, defensively and offensively,” Zvezda coach Dejan Radonjic said. “We had some problems defensively in the first half, but we got better in the second. We managed to make them miss some shots in the last few minutes. It’s an important win for us, especially in this moment, because we had so many problems with corona this month, but we played a really good game.”
An empty arena
Only 1,000 Olympiacos fans attended the game due to the most recent COVID-19 restrictions in Greece. It was a rather different situation to the team’s previous home matches, something that coach Giorgos Bartzokas pointed out.
“I would like to congratulate Red Star, they had a solid defensive and offensive game for 40 minutes,” Bartzokas said. “Of course, they took advantage of the fact we missed a lot of players right now, injured players, COVID cases. That fact affects obviously our preparation for the game, also we are playing in an empty gym. I’m not complaining, and I respect the government’s decisions, but the circumstances are not the same for everybody. We played against Fenerbahce in a full gym, also in Tel Aviv, and here we played in an empty gym. It’s still early in the season, we have many rounds ahead of us to build back and we are going to do it through our work and team effort.”