By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Moses Wright scored 16 out of his season-high 20 points in the fourth quarter while draining the go-ahead 3-pointer as Olympiacos Piraeus beat Crvena Zvezda 89 – 86 on the road to clinch a spot in the EuroLeague playoffs and continue the push for a Top-4 finish.
“Pap [Kostas Papanikolaou] was just talking about how bad I did rebounding… and then I was thinking of how [Giannoulis Larentzakis] called me soft,” Wright said. “Going into the second half I was thinking about those comments from the veterans of the team.”
A thriller until the last seconds
Wright, made the triple to put Olympiacos up 87 – 84 with 24 seconds remaining after Adam Hanga tied the score for Zvezda. The Reds’ big man had gone 0 – 2 from the line with 78 – 82 a bit before, following a 7 – 8 start.
Naz Mitrou-Long misfired in free throws and so did Nemanja Nedovic from the 3-point line, only for Joel Bolomboy to score after the offensive rebound. Thomas Walkup put Olympiacos up by three points and the hosts didn’t manage to get a shot up in the remaining three seconds to suffer a defeat in their last home game in this EuroLeague season.
Kostas Papanikolaou posted 12 points, six assists and five rebounds for Olympiacos while Walkup had 12 points plus five assists. Nigel Williams-Goss contributed 10 points and six assists.
“You saw how Red Star played in the game. The rebounds, the 50-50 balls they took,” Olympiacos coach Giorgos Bartzokas said. “They wanted the match desperately and that was the lesson for us. Because maybe some players inside their minds thought that Red Star wouldn’t have any interest in the game. Congratulations to Red Star and congratulations to our players for one more important win.”
Bolomboy led Zvezda overall with 19 points and 12 rebounds. Adam Hanga added 19 points of his own on a career-high five 3-pointers out of six attempts.
“We tried to win the game,” Zvezda coach Giannis Sfairopoulos said. “We played and fought until the end. We showed that could do a lot better during the season if we didn’t have injuries and if we had all our players together.”