By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
CSKA Moscow beat Baskonia at home with a great performance in the last quarter. With this win, the Russian side booked their playoff tickets as they became the first team to qualify for the next round.
“As I said once again regarding that we are the first team that qualifies for the playoffs. This actually says how tough is Euroleague. Just seven games before the end of the regular season we just secured the playoffs so when I said at the beginning of the season on your questions what is the target I said the first thing is the playoffs its realistic and this is how it is. The second part is to keep the home court advantage”, said CSKA coach Dimitris Itoudis.
It wasn’t an easy night for CSKA as they had some problems, especially in the first half. “We kind of had a lack of continuity and lack of being aggressive in both ends defensively and offensively especially at the beginning of the game. We managed to win three quarters of the game and congratulations to the players for that. We were much focused to defend and we managed to reduce their productivity and to reduce their effectiveness especially beyond the arc because they were shooting 80 % in the first half“, said the Greek coach and then added: “Jayson Granger had a lot of open looks and we managed to reduce them to 37 points in the second comparing to 49 points in the second half. That’s a huge difference in the tonight’s game.At the same time, we stayed focused on offense and we had a lot of chances to score. We did target a lot on the post and we had a lot of good creations from the post. we moved the ball pretty good. The problems we had defensively can be translated and can be justified also by watching the turnovers because most of the turnovers of Baskonia were the product of good defense. We forced 19 turnovers overall”
On the other side, Pedro Martinez wasn’t satisfied with the result, but he believes that his team played a good game. “I think we played a good game, but our problem is to remain at the same level in the offense. We had problems in the last quarter. We played good basketball for the first three quarters, but the fourth was for us a little bit longer, too long. It is very difficult to play CSKA, it’s a great team. They had a lot of rebounds. It was very difficult on defense in low-post situations. I think we did a good job, but it is not easy to win on this court”, said Martinez.