Bartzokas: "We are going to be a tough opponent for every team"

The win against Barcelona was a road win with a message according to the coach of Olympiacos.

“It was a win I sincerely appreciate. It’s always hard to be playing at the Palau Blaugrana, against such a talented and experienced team like Barcelona. Each win here really counts. Of course, it’s only the beginning of the season, it was simply the first game of the season. But we wanted to showcase our potential, our mentality and the fact that we are going to be a very tough opponent for any team this season. We are going to be playing hard in any court”.  

And he went on to say: “We were truly compact in defense throughout the game. We stopped Barcelona’s facilitation, a team that has offensively talented players. Somehow we controlled the game and when we found open shots and some open threes with some good shooters we have, we got a ten point difference and managed to end the game. We are grateful to our fans that travelled here to support us. Good luck to Barcelona”.   

Asked whether the key to winning was defense, he replied: “It’s hard top analyze the game at this point. I’ll need to watch the video. We played defense with switches for most of the game and that’s how we tried to stop Barcelona from facilitating in their usual mode, when everyone is moving together and pass the ball. They have many good set plays, they play a targeted game and we defended this way because we have big players that can guard the opposing guards and we also have some tall guards who can protect our rim. We had wanted to control the rebounds through our defense, which was not easy because Barcelona plays with 2 or 3 big players in their lineup. They started out with Vesely, Sanli and Kalinic and controlled the rebounds. In that kind of game, this has been very important and everyone did an excellent job. Also, Barcelona played for quite some time defense with switches and we had to ‘read’ that. We had to have balance between passing inside at the mismatch with passing from inside out to our good shooters. We have had patience and were quite good so as to understand that we had to play against that particular kind of defense Barcelona was playing. We had the time to attack with drives, we had the opportunity to shoot threes and we have had some good pick & catch with Bolomboy. We have had excellent percentages from the free throw line. We did not miss one free throw and that’s always very important in those kind of games”.