By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Fenerbahce Beko coach Sarunas Jasikevicius tried to explain how his team is performing much better on the road than at home following the 69 – 99 EuroLeague loss to AS Monaco. This was the fourth defeat out for the Turkish side in Istanbul through eight games.
“I’m not exactly what is wrong in our [home] games,” Saras said in the post-game presser. “The mentality is wrong. Something is wrong about our mentality. We are analyzing things, probably as you can understand. This is one of the things that we the coaching staff is talking about. A lot of things. Why are we doing things good, why are we doing things bad. A lot of times, a lot of coaches choose to leave it to the flow and don’t talk about things. We talk about things a lot. We are number 18th team at home. That means that we aren’t ready to play at home. In our losses at home, we always commit six turnovers in the first quarter. Today it was 4. It wasn’t bad.”
Four out of the five losses that Fenerbahce has registered this season have arrived in front of their fans: Against Panathinaikos Athens, Crvena Zvezda, Olimpia Milano and AS Monaco.
On the contrary, Fener is much superior away from home, having won six out of their seven gams on the road.
“One of the theories i have is that we come to show ourselves for the fans while on the road we are prepard to suffer a bit more,” Jasikevicius mentioned. “Maybe it’s this. The scheduling also. But yes we understand we have a problem, especially when it comes to how we start our games. We’ve talked about it and let’s see if we can correct it.”
Fenerbahce was unable to match up Monaco, especially in the second half. Apart from being unable to hold off the offense of their opponents, Jasikevicius’ players shot 4 out of 21 on 3-pointers and finished with just nine assists for 11 turnovers.
“This isn’t something that we’re expecting,” Saras said. “We are a team that’s passing the ball. If you look at our percentages, it’s something like… if you make more shots there’s going to be more assists. But, we need better guard play. There’s no question about that.”