By Eurohoops team / info@eurohoops.net
Baskonia hasn’t had the best of starts this season, entering this week’s EuroLeague Round 12 against Zalgiris in Kaunas with a five-game losing streak. It looked like this was about to be the sixth straight defeat, as the home side was leading by 16 points late in the third, but they bounced back.
Chima Moneke finished as his team’s leading scorer with 17 points and spoke about Baskonia’s spirit. “I feel like in a lot of our games this season, we go down a lot and we start fighting. Personally, I never feel like the game is over. No matter what the score is, as long as there’s time on the board”, he said.
Praising some basketball colleagues in the post-game flash interview, he mentioned a reference for self-belief. “I wanna give a shoutout to Shane Larkin and Elijah Bryant, I was seeing their podcast “Off the ReCourt”, Nigel Hayes-Davis was the guest and he’s preaching self-confidence and belief. I was watching that before getting on the bus to get here. That helped me stay confident”, he continued.
“We’ve been losing, I’ve been playing okay and I wanna play way better. I’ve not been shooting the ball well, I know I’m a better shooter than that. I believe in myself and the team, we believe in each other. People outside don’t believe in us, which is fine: we hear it. As soon as we believe in each other, then we can do good things”, Chima Moneke followed later on.
When asked about what could be the team’s ceiling, he avoided answering. “We can’t start thinking about the ceiling, the rest of the season. We have another game on Sunday in the ACB. We need to be consistent and find, whatever was working for us today, especially in the second half, the last 15 minutes. We need to just stick with that and go from there”, the 28-year-old forward said.
PHOTO CREDIT: Turkish Airlines EuroLeague
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