By Eurohoosp team/ info@eurohoops.net
Nigel Hayes-Davis had his best game yet this season, scoring 33 points. His inspiration was a video with Kobe Bryant that he watched before the game.
As he said in his postgame interview at EuroLeague TV, when asked about his performance: “It’s funny, I just watched a video and Kobe was giving an interview and he was asked if he had hit a wall and he was like, I don’t think so but if I did, I would just run through the wall. And I was watching that before coming to the court and that was the mentality I wanted in there, being aggressive, because I learned a valuable lesson”.
Fenerbahce’s forward elaborated on the lessons: “I tried to let the game come to me against Milan and Nico (Mirotic) embarrassed me, I tried to do the same thing in Baskonia and we got embarrassed as a team, so I wanted to show what I have learned from those lessons”.
Especially after losing to Baskonia, coach Sarunas Jasikevicius bluntly said that some of his players were unprofessional and Hayes-Davis explained that the players themselves should be able to have motivation and be professionals: “It’s a thing he wouldn’t have to tell us. We make good money, great money to, you know, play a bit harder, so it’s more of an effort thing. And once we played with great effort and great intensity, it’s up to us to go out there and execute. If the ball goes in, it’s great, if not, we can rely on rebounding, hassle plays, plays that don’t require talent, just a lot of effort”.