By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
The Greek Freak had an excellent night with 37 points and 10 rebounds, only for the Bucks to lose 128-119 to the Pacers in the first game of the Las Vegas “Final Four” in the first-ever NBA in-season tournament.
“The talent level we have is incredible, but we have to be more organized,” Giannis Antetokounmpo said afterward, explaining to the media why the Bucks couldn’t deliver.
As Giannis elaborated: “I feel like sometimes we’re not organized at all. We don’t know what we try to get from our offense, or sometimes defensively we’re not sprinting back. We don’t shoot a lot of early 3s. At the end of the day, you have to protect the ball. You have to know where the ball is. We had a lot of situations today that they got a lot of dunks, open 3s, early 3s. We have to be better”.
Antetokounmpo admitted that the effort level of the Bucks was not up to the challenge: “Nobody is going to give you nothing. Like sometimes I feel like we expect just because we have great players out there, that Tyrese Haliburton or Myles Turner or Aaron Nesmith, somebody is not just going to give us the game. Like, no. We have to be better. We have to go out there and take it. You know at the end of the day, I think we are great players, but if we don’t go out there and compete, they are not going to respect us. They played their best against us.”
However, Giannis didn’t blame the coaching staff of the Bucks for the way the team performed.
Talking directly about the players, he added: “The players play the game. We play the game, you know? Coaches can say whatever they want to say and put us in the position to be successful, and you hope that they do that for you. But you’ve got to make the plays, you know? Like, you don’t sprint back on defense, it’s not the coaches’ fault you don’t sprint back. If you’re not able to execute down the stretch and you turn the ball over and you throw it to your opponent’s hands, it’s not the coaches’ fault. You just have to take that.”
“At the end of the day, I felt like their bench kicked our butts,” Antetokounmpo added. “It’s simple. I saw the stat sheet. I usually don’t look at the stat sheet, but I look at the stat sheet, they do it way better than us. We have to address it. We have three days now until Monday when we play Chicago at home. We have to get on the court. We have to get into the film room. We have to talk as a team and hopefully, we can expedite our chemistry. It’s not about the coach. It’s like we have to get better. It’s on us now. We have the talent, we have the experience. It’s on us. We know it’s on us.”