By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Shane Larkin scored 28 points on 6/8 triples to lead Anadolu Efes past Bayern Munich 109 – 86 at home in a key battle for the EuroLeague Play-In race. This was the third win over the last four EuroLeague games for Efes that is now tied with Bayern at 12 – 6.
What is more, Efes now has the tiebreaker against Bayern and an advantage if the two teams finish with the record in the final standings.
Efes was already up 53 – 49 at halftime and then went on to dominate Bayern 35 – 16 in the third quarter to establish a large margin.
Larkin scored 14 of his points during that stretch to propel the Turkish side towards ultimately a comfortable win.
Will Clyburn added 21 points for Efes. Carsen Edwards led Bayern with 19 points and Vladimir Lucic dropped 18 points.
“If we make it to the play-in, anything is possible”
“Today we attacked together”, said Larkin after the game elaborating on what he meant.
As he added in his flash interview: “At the beginning of the match, Bayern tried to throw us out of rhythm by trying different defenses. Despite this, we shared the ball well and found many open shots, so we finished the match with 20 assists. We have to play every match aggressively like this. We have to go to the rim and then pass the ball. We achieved this today and got an important win. We need to progress game by game for the play-in race, I told my teammates this after the match. Today we both won the match and got the tiebreaker. Still, we are not in a position to relax, we have to work hard every day. We have to fight until the end to qualify for the play-in. If we can achieve this, then anything is possible”.
Coach Tomislav Mijatovic agreed with his star: “I hope we can all celebrate together here at the end of the regular season. However, we are not looking at the big picture right now, we are taking it step by step”.
Bayern coach Pablo Laso had a different point of view: “For me, the problem on the court today was not ‘lack of communication’, we did not look ready from the beginning of the match. Anadolu Efes showed what a good team they are, they have good players. We always seemed to be one step behind Efes, even when we were superior in the first half we were not playing the right game. We didn’t play together as a team from the very beginning”.
Photo credit: EuroLeague