Bartzokas: “Anadolu Efes is a principled team”
Olympiacos is hosting Anadolu Efes on Thursday (13/2, 19:00 CET) for the 6th round of the Euroleague TOP-16 and the reds’ coach Giorgos Bartzokas pointed out that they need to be careful against the Turkish team.
“We are facing Anadolu Efes following two continues victories of theirs for the Euroleague and by now they are by no means the ‘poor relative’ of the group. According to their ranking, they can definitely make the top four teams of the group. I have read a statement Vasileiadis has made, that there is no pressure for them in regard to the Euroleague and if they have achieved that then they have achieved a major triumph since they are a much more expensive team than Olympiacos. Anadolu Efes has quality in its roster, they have improved some things after the change of the head coach, they are defense oriented, Mr. Angelou has managed that emphasizing the need for it at practice and they have also made some decisions in regard to Erden and Hopson while they have given more minutes to Balbay and Gonlum.
They are very patient in their game. Earlier in the season, when something wasn’t going their way in the game they would drop it, now they are different. Both against Milan in their home court, as well as against Laboral Kutxa on the road, although they were trailing, they turned the game around. They are a team that wants to play defense. We are steadily improving our performance. This is due to the options we now have at practice; we are practicing hard without any absentees. We are now facing a problem with Printezis. He’s here today, he will try to practice even for a little while and play tomorrow. Even he being here is important. Printezis is important to us one way or another.
We’ll try for Giorgos to play, Agravanis is going to take minutes, Perperoglou as well we’ll by playing the ‘4’ position for some time and we are going to use some internal tricks. Many teams that play the Final-8 face some wear and tear, problems get created. We saw what happened in Milan, anyone can wonder how Unicaja is going to react after getting eliminated in their home court. Anadolu Efes played well in the Final-8, but they lost the final by one point and it remains to be seen how the players are going to deal with it. And we have to decide how we are going to play them. We played 7 games against them last season, one friendly game in the summer, so one team knows the other very well. Olympiacos like to play up tempo, with more offensive plays than Efes does.
There is no doubt they are very talented as a team and very compound. I know that both in Ankara and in Spain the Cup tournaments were held with fans from all teams and how the quarter and semi-finals evolved with all these big score differences. Surprises are a tradition for the Cup tournament, the Cup may not be something extraordinary but it’s always a title. But traditionally we have surprises happening. The Final-8s are great tournaments for player agents to do business. They do about 80% of their work in the summer and the rest at these tournaments. I would also like to comment on the social media, they can make you laugh at least. We are not looking for a guard, I read that Olympiacos and Panathinaikos are battling for the same guard; one can only laugh at something like that. We are happy with our roster we are happy with all our players and our main concern is that Olympiacos makes the Euroleague play-offs. Dragisevic is a good player, no question on that. But you don’t sign players amidst the season except for the case of injuries. If Petway and Law hadn’t been injured, Olympiacos would continue to the end with its initial roster. Olympiacos does not come to agreement with players in view of upcoming seasons. We have investigated some possibilities only because Simmons was injured. When we investigated the market, we looked at any possible player, Ajinca and Sermadini including. The situation however at present is as I describe it to be, we want to finish the season with the present roster. We are not looking for players to play the ‘4’ or the ‘5’ position, we are happy with what we’ve got. Competition is huge at practices”.