By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
The Italian team has a long-term project and as Pianigiani said: “Euroleague should be a place for us to feel good. It shouldn’t be something which makes us feel depressed because it’s difficult for everybody. Teams with one or two more wins are struggling more in their domestic league. Euroleague should be a place where we understand where we are and get over our limits and we will have to try to do it till the end of the season. Tonight we didn’t use the experience because we gave up too early. But I appreciated that after 3 road games the team found a way to practice well, winning to 2 road games in Italy and stay the course”.
Coach Pianigiani also admitted that CSKA was the better team: “We knew the game was going to be prohibitive. I expected CSKA to play a statement game and they did. We tried to come back and were close in the third, then we made a couple of silly mistakes. Then we waited for the game to end and this is wrong. I wanted to use this game to improve.”
CSKA on the other hand, had an easy night and coach Dimitris Itoudis was pleased: “I think we were the better team tonight and that was proved on the court by numbers, by performance. We wanted to bounce back after a couple of bad performances that were not at our level. I think we were consistent in what we wanted on the court. The numbers could be a little bit better for us, but still, we had a good opponent in front of us and they tried to come back in the third quarter. They pressured us and that led to 3 turnovers and bad shots. We gave them the opportunity to come back, but after all, we found exactly what we wanted on the court, the advantages and therefore shot very well from two-point range – fast breaks, post-ups and a lot of good synchronizations in the pick-and-roll game”.
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