By Panos Katsiroubas/ info@eurohoops.net
The magnifying Glass focuses its attention on all the European courts of Turkish Airlines Euroleague and each week it will choose to examine through its basketball lens some of the games that stole the show in the top competition!
CSKA Moscow’s splash brothers
CSKA and Real Madrid lined up on the court of Moscow’s Universal Sports Hall for a battle between two teams that have reached the summit of Europe a total 15 times. The home team was the one that celebrated the win in the end, with relative ease, by basing their game on two axes. The first one was the offensive presence of the amazing duo of Nando De Colo and Milos Teodosic. The two of them literally raged and blew Madrid’s defense to smithereens. Everything that Madrid tried defensively didn’t work. They risked mid-range shots, especially on the French guard, trying to cut off the lanes to the paint, but by reading the defenses he took the shots at the right time and was on target with almost every one. The problem for Madrid was that it didn’t have big men behind the screens who could successfully defend such great players in the facet of reading the game and executing: as a result, the visitors’ defense was exposed systematically. The result was that De Colo and Teodosic combined for 51 points and 14 assists. In other words, 55% of CSKA’S points and 70% of its assists.
The second axis of the win was the defensive adjustments CSKA made on Madrid’s mastermind, Sergio Rodriguez. The defense made a statement that it wasn’t going to lose to the Spanish point guard. CSKA contained him almost the entire game by having players with great explosiveness and size, like Nikita Kurbanov and Cory Higgins, guard Rodriguez, limit his area of influence and force him to pass. Kurbanov, especially, has been utilized many times this year in complex and kamikaze defenses of coach Dimitrios Itoudis’s team. The defense managed to achieve its goals with Rodriguez attempting only 7 shots, for 6 points, though he was still able to dish 13 of his team’s 18 assists while also committing 5 turnovers. Beyond this, Madrid took some things that CSKA’s defense gave away, most characteristically with K. C. Rivers’s isolations against Teodosic, giving him room to play this kind of game.
The youngster Luka Doncic also came up with solutions, mostly in the first half, when CSKA’s defense dealt with him with an “under” tactic on screens, giving him the opportunity to make three shots from behind the 6.75-meter arc and finish the game with 12 points. In the end, CSKA achieved its aim – not to let Rodriguez decide the game – while Madrid once again couldn’t produce the successive defensive stops that would have kept them closer in the score.
Defense and the Holy Quaternity
Two of the Euroleague’s most in-form teams faced each other in the Fernando Buesa Arena in Vitoria, with Olympiacos Piraeus getting a big away win against Laboral Kutxa Vitoria Gasteiz. Once again, Olympiaocos’s defense made the difference, limiting the Spanish team to 76 points, 16 fewer than its average in home games this season. The visitors controlled the game’s rhythm, didn’t allow transition scoring – with a few exceptions – and generally created big problems with double-teams and hedge outs against half-court sets. As such, Laboral coach Velimir Perasovic’s team was confined to 9 assists as compared to an average of almost double that prior to the game. Olympiacos made 11 steals overall and their big men denied passes, just about obliterating the post game of Ioannis Bourousis and Tornike Shengelia. Generally, on every Laboral pass there were Olympiacos bodies and hands all over the place. On offense, the difference was once again made by Olympiacos’s “Holy Quaternity”. Vangelis Mantzaris guided his team’s game masterfully, reading plays very well, scoring from the perimeter when left open, but also taking the right lanes to the basket whenever he had the chance.
Vassilis Spanoulis, the second-best scorer in Euroleague history, despite the well-adapted defense of good defenders like Jaka Blazic and Fabien Causeur, made big shots after screens, but also mid-range shots when he found opposing big men blocking his way to the rim. Georgios Printezis made a great contribution scoring in the post but also in transition. And Othello Hunter did a great job with fast blocks and some nice trick plays of simulated screens and direct cuts to the basket – the so-called fake screens. This quartet scored 65 out of Olympiacos’s 82 points, while keeping their concentration throughout almost the entire game against a team full of energy and athleticism that’s excellent on the open court. A significant role in Olympiacos’s victory was also played by its amazing effectiveness in second-chance points, with the visitors scoring almost all the points they could get from their 10 offensive rebounds.
Barca’s rhapsody is Khimki’s “landing”
After its formidable appearance and victory in Top 16 Round 1 against CSKA, Khimki Moscow Region appeared unrecognizable on the road against FC Barcelona Lassa. The visitors lost with uncharacteristic ease after having found themselves all but out of the game when the first half ended 49-29. On the other side, Barcelona circulated the ball impressively, with an amazing Juan Carlos Navarro in the first half, scoring and creating with frequency. The visitors couldn’t break up their opponents’ many screens, whether on the ball or away from it. The fissures were constant and the way to the basket was wide open, with Barcelona scoring at will inside the paint. Overall, the winners scored 44 points there with excellent percentages and no-pressure finishes.
It’s also worth mentioning as an example of excellent teamwork the 13 assists in the first 14 made shots of the home team. Tomas Satoransky played excellent defense for the greater part of the game against Tyrese Rice, not letting him score a lot, while Alexey Shved scored mainly after the game had been decided. The visitors’ defense, especially when covering the big men, was quite bad and the key was essentially an unguarded passage on most plays. Also, as we mentioned last week, Khimki is a team with some individuality in its game, with a lot of shots in one-on-one situations, especially from the perimeter. The final 3-for-23 from outside the three-point line, for a team that shot close to 37% in the first 11 games and had 53% one week ago against CSKA, partly reveals the risks of playing this way in such high-level games. In general, Khimki is a team that relies on a game of instinct and this is what they’re going to subsist on for the rest of the tournament. Barcelona showed once more that on set plays they have an overabundance of options and good plays they can implement to the full extent against teams whose defense is not their strongest weapon.
The thriller in Krasnodar
A thriller in Krasnodar saw Lokomotiv Kuban Krasnodar prevailing in the end over Anadolu Efes Istanbul in a game in which the home team showed two faces in terms of its defense. In the first half, Lokomotiv’s usual relentless pressure on the ball was missing and Efes players could create gaps with pick-and-rolls from the middle or the wings. Even when the ball didn’t find the paint, isolated attacks from the perimeter found their target as the defensive pressure at the time of execution was not the appropriate one. The 43 points conceded in one half from a Lokomotiv team that has the best defense in the competition are certainly a lot. Furthermore, on offense, Lokomotiv’s players missed dunks and rather easy lay-ups, often despite circulating the ball well. In the second half, Lokomotiv’s defense changed. It became extremely tight, closed all spaces to the Efes guards and used switches effectively. In the last quarter, with Chris Singleton and Anthony Randolph as big men, Lokomotiv’s defense became impenetrable as they deflected many balls aimed at the basket. The result was that Efes made only 7 shots in the second half, two of them near the shot-clock buzzer by Derrick Brown and John Diebler.
In the first half, Efes had made 18 field goals, which demonstrates the different levels of defensive pressure by coach Georgios Bartzokas’s team in the two halves. Apart from Randolph’s defense and amazing performance on offense, opening up the court with good mid-range shots, and despite Victor Claver’s consistent help, it was quite clear that Malcolm Delaney’s awakening was also needed to turn the game around. The American star had scored 12 of his 25 points in the fourth quarter, both from long distance and driving to the basket. Efes coach Dusan Ivkovic tried to contain Lokomotiv’s game through zone defense in some places, and when Delaney got warmed up, even tried a box-and-one – zone for four players and the fifth guarding Delaney one-on-one. The bad thing for the visitors was that Delaney’s outburst coincided with their own offensive blockage. The Efes offense was static at every level and most shots came at the end of the shot clock, under bad circumstances, and ended up missing the target. The talent in passing is there, but the Efes attackers couldn’t connect with each other, especially in the second half.
The ball fell in…the green pocket
The last of the Top 16 Round 2 thrillers saw Panathinaikos Athens get a win against Unicaja Malaga with a three-pointer by James Feldeine 11 seconds before the end of a game that, if we consider the absences of Stefan Markovic and, mostly, Mindaugas Kuzminskas for the visitors, few expected to be so competitive so late. The absence of the Lithuanian is quite significant for Unicaja coach Joan Plaza, since Kuzminskas can play in the post from, has good shooting ability and fits well in the small line-ups that make the Spanish team dangerous. The visitors put up a good team effort that, as the game progressed, made them more and more competitive. They protected their rim rather well, except for some penetrations by Dimitris Diamantidis and Nick Calathes. Panathinaikos’s captain made an excellent appearance, with 17 points and 7 assists, missing just a free throw as he became the seventh-best scorer in Euroleague history. Unicaja might have seemed strong on defense, but on offense, Kuzminskas’s absence was apparent. The ball couldn’t reach the post and many attacks, even if they resulted in a basket, were hastily executed. The Spanish team had two dead periods, one that lasted 5 minutes in the second quarter and one that lasted 4 minutes in the third, when they couldn’t execute in their attacks. Many of them ended with the ball still in a player’s hands after the 24 seconds were up. Panathinaikos, too, presented dysfunction in circulating the ball and didn’t have a lot of movement away from it.
Solutions were found mostly when Calathes and Diamantidis were on the court together, both of them passing without abusing the dribble and generally reading the open lanes. Overall, it was a game in which both teams didn’t have a lot of rhythm and the only player who seemed to find any was Jamar Smith. Unicaja’s smooth guard scored in every way against Panathinaikos, including some great and well-guarded shots. He took advantage of switches, dribbled to the basket when the defense tried to deny his shot, and in the end finished with 22 points. Smith’s outburst was accompanied by Plaza’s smart idea to switch his defense over to a 2-3 zone 8 minutes before the end, taking advantage of the four fouls that had kept Calathes grounded on the bench. Panathinaikos committed 4 turnovers in 5 minutes and scored only a single basket, even that on a rather lucky shot by Aleksandar Pavlovic. The Spaniards lost several chances toward the end to get a big win. An offensive rebound by James Gist after his own missed free throw saved the home team as they won an extra possession. Diamantidis encountered the zone’s double-team on the screen that he received and passed to Feldeine for the winning shot. Unicaja set up a good last possession with Smith going out to the corner following a screen, but this time he didn’t find the target.