Bartzokas: «We’ll examine our mistakes and will be ready for the next game» (vid)

Olympiacos did not succeed in beating Crvena Zvezda at the SEF and that, according to the Olympiacos’ coach, Giorgos Brartzokas, was due to the poor defensive operation of our team, among other factors.

“First of all, I would like to congratulate Crvena Zvezda on their win. It was a really interesting game and at the same time a very strange one. That’s because we have had 26 assists, our team made 16 turnovers and we still lost. It’s really strange however, we are going to be analyzing what we did wrong and we are going to be ready for our next game”.

Asked whether the problem had to do with the bad defensive performance of his team, he replied: “When the opponent is scoring that much, with such good percentages, you definitely need to be better at defending. I would like not to comment on other factors though. I don’t think it’s just them, but I also don’t want to be disciplined. As for the last offense, we played a set play, that entails a screen on the ball and a back pick from the power forward. For that play, our organizer had been Sloukas, we had Black for the screen on the ball and Vezenkov at the back pick. We also had two shooters, Larentzakis and Papanikolaou at the corners to find a shot and win the game or win a foul, depending on how things evolved. We got a pull up with Sloukas and we missed. If he had made it, we would have won, because we were trailing by two. But that wasn’t the real issue. Shots either get in or not. It’s part of the game”.

On his part, Zvezda’s coach, Dusko Ivanovic, commented the following: “It was a difficult game. For me, Olympiacos is one of the best teams of this season’s Euroleague and a clear favorite to make it all the way to the Final Four. I think that we were able to contain the full range of Vezenkov’s game and apart from the first twenty minutes when we had a big problem with rebounding, we got better in the second half and did whatever we had to do to win the game”.