By Panos Katsiroubas/ info@eurohoops.net
The magnifying Glass focuses its attention on all the European courts of Turkish Airlines Euroleague and each week will choose to examine through its basketball lens some of the games that stole the show in the top competition!
Real Madrid: The problem starts on defense
Khimki Moscow Region managed to get a huge away win against a Real Madrid team that seems adrift while it continues searching for its defensive filter. The bad thing for Pablo Laso’s team is that some players who did a magnificent job getting the team back to the European throne last season look like they’re not in such good shape so far this year. Andres Nocioni and Jonas Maciulis play less and have offered little to the Spanish team. They are players that bring energy mostly on defense, where Madrid has a big problem. After the 99 points they conceded against FC Bayern Munich and the 93 against Strasbourg, Khimki scored 85 points relatively easily. The home team couldn’t contain Tyrese Rice or Alexey Shved. Apart from Jeff Taylor’s excellent defense on Rice in some intervals, for most of the game these two players utilized their individual talent and created big problems for Madrid.
Rice, usually after screens on the ball, found the time and space to execute his favorite mid-range shot as Madrid’s big men couldn’t react fast enough. The American guard finished the game with 16 points and 8 assists, with Shved contributing 13 points and 3 assists. Madrid’s rotation of its big men looks problematic as well, with the team essentially playing with one center, Gustavo Ayon, and with a conditional center, Felipe Reyes, as a second solution. This rotation makes it hard for them to play switching defenses and in every game this problem becomes more and more apparent. Madrid concedes almost 85 points on average and with a 2-4 record must improve immediately. Pablo Laso’s players made several bad choices and were quite individualistic in their offensive game. Madrid mostly found solutions in the open court with Sergio Rodriguez being the only one who could read the game with any confidence.
It was all decided along the perimeter
Maccabi FOX Tel Aviv suffered yet another defeat at home, this time from CSKA Moscow. Despite his team presenting a different approach to their offensive game, new head coach Zan Tabak’s debut was not successful. Once again, Maccabi was betrayed by its major weakness this year, bad defense on the perimeter. The home team was tough only in the opening 10 minutes, when they protected their key and generally pressed their opponents, making it hard for them to move the ball well. From the second quarter onwards they were simply spectators at yet another show from CSKA‘s backcourt, mostly Milos Teodosic. Tabak’s players couldn’t break up the screens and were passive in rotations. The only thing they could do well on defense was to restrict the finishes by CSKA’s big men in the pick-and-roll game.
Dimitrios Itoudis’s players created open shots with simple moves and opened up Maccabi’s defense with their good circulation of the ball. The visitors averaged 25 points over the last three quarters, 75 of their 88 total. The backcourt of the visitors (Teodosic, Nando De Colo, Aaron Jackson, Vitaly Fridzon and Cory Higgins) scored 65 of those 88 points with 11-for-22 three-point shooting! In addition to this, they had 15 assists, something that shows the high level of collaboration. For Maccabi, things are now very difficult. They have only one victory and are going to play three of the next four games away from home. The area that Maccabi seems to be improving on offense is their transition game, which they try to pursue at every opportunity as they have players that are very capable on the run. Teodosic was brilliant once again with 25 points and 5 assists, and numerous moments of basketball magic.
“Well-worked team” award
It was an amazing performance by Brose Baskets Bamberg, with used amazing defense to nail the first defeat of the competition on Unicaja Malaga. Aside from the defense, Andrea Trinchieri’s team had a really good presence on offense as well. If we could hand an award to the German team, that would be for the most well-worked one, but also the one with the biggest coaching seal on its game. Even in the first quarter, when Joan Plaza’s team had the lead, Bamberg were the ones who worked more properly in offense, made good shots, had good movement, just missing on effective executions. On the other side, Unicaja Malaga’s players scored some tough shots from the perimeter, necessity shots, since the lanes to Bamberg’s basket were blocked. On offense, the home team was exemplary, with a lot of screens on and away from the ball, also inside the paint, continual movement and changes of position, good reading of mismatches and finally, solid passes that led to open shots.
It’s telling that the Spanish team scored almost 84 points on average in the first five games of the competition but in this game dropped 30 points below that. The percentages of Plaza’s team were hopeless, but were related to the conditions under which Unicaja Malaga’s players executed. The visitors made 16-for-54 shots in total and didn’t take advantage at all of the 10 additional possessions they had from their extra offensive rebounds and 11 steals. On the other side, Bamberg distributed the ball amazingly well and this is reflected in the final number of 21 assists. The German champions are rightfully moving towards the Top 16, having lost only to Moscow and Unicaja in the first leg, and neither of those victories was easy for their opponents to get.
The fierce five minutes
Lokomotiv Kuban Krasnodar got a big win in the Greek capital against Panathinaikos Athens and plunged the Greens into the anguish of qualification. It was a game with lots of tactics and great individual performances. The tactical approach of Georgios Bartzokas’s team was to stop Panathinaikos‘s central pick-and-roll through Miroslav Raduljica. The defensive players who played along the wings blocked the central lane and risked Panathinaikos getting shots from the side. Not only were Aleksandar Djordjevic’s players slow in passing the ball out to the wings, where the gaps in the defense existed, when they did so, either the shots were off target or the players hesitated to shoot. The hosts became very predictable and managed to increase its scoring mostly through defense, but also when they essentially attacked from the wings with pick-and-rolls or through the post when Chris Singleton was playing center for Lokomotiv. Panathinaikos got back in the game thanks to their good defense and a rash of turnovers by Lokomotiv. The Greek team got help from James Feldeine, its only player who shot and scored with consistency and fluency.
Right when Panathinaikos looked like its were taking the reins, Malcolm Delaney showed up and played a fierce five minutes of basketball. In the second half of the -third quarter the American guard scored 20 points in just 4 minutes and 16 seconds. It was a formidable blitz from the perimeter, a blitz that hasn’t been accomplished in such a short period of time in the competition in recent years! In the last quarter, the key player was Victor Claver. The Spanish forward contributed in all areas. He played some great defense that was accompanied by steals, he renewed possessions on offense with his offensive rebounds, he read plays and made some decisive passes, while he also scored some big shots. The home team ran out of solutions and they lost fairly, despite the fact that Lokomotiv didn’t do anything spectacular on offense in terms of teamwork. Panathinaikos is missing good shots from the wings and an athletic big man who can play switching defense after screens on the ball.
The three axes of complete dominance
There was an amazing performance by Fenerbahce Istanbul and an easy win in Munich against FC Bayern, despite the absences of Kostas Sloukas and Bogdan Bogdanovic, who didn’t play due to injuries. The game was decided early on with Zeljko Obradovic‘s team closing out the first quarter with a 20-point lead, 10-30. The axes of this complete dominance were three. The first was the visitors’ tight defense against the talented perimeter of Svetislav Pesic’s team. Bayern couldn’t find lanes to the basket or any open shots. The hosts tried to get the ball inside the paint to John Bryant but there, too, the defense of Jan Vesely and Ekpe Udoh was amazing. The second part was Fenerbahce‘s transition game. Having secured the defensive rebounds and carried out good defenses, they produced many baskets in the open court and got many easy points. The third reason was Bobby Dixon‘s great performance. The American guard was amazing in the first quarter, scoring 16 of his total 25 points.
He finished the game with 7-for-13 three-point shooting. At some point he looked like he might reach the record of 10 shots on target that Andrew Goudelock made in the same game from last season! From that point onwards, armed with their defense, the visitors were never threatened. They limited Bayern to 67 points, when until then the hosts had been producing an average of 77 per game. Pesic’s team had their weakest offensive night in terms of statistics. It was their worst appearance so far in the competition, in two- and three-point shooting. Aside from Dixon, Luigi Datome also had a great game with 17 points and 6 assists, while on both sides of the court Udoh and Vesely were impressive. The Czech especially, who won six possessions for his team as he made 4 steals and 2 blocks and protected his team from the drives of Bayern’s guards. Consecutive home defeats to Crvena Zvezda Telekom Belgrade and Fenerbahce put Bayern in a difficult position with regard to its goal of qualifying to the next phase.