By Stefan Djordjevic / sdjordjevic@eurohoops.net
Olympiacos has finished its 2020-21 season with an 82-75 home win over Khimki Moscow Region and Sahsa Vezenkov, who’s been in great form recently, led the way once again.
Vezenkov logged a double-double with 20 points (on 7-11 shooting) and 11 rebounds while Georgios Printezis followed with 14 and Octavius Ellis with 11 points. Vassilis Spanoulis contributed with nine assists.
The man of the match, despite the great performance and the win, wasn’t happy.
“It doesn’t feel good because we didn’t make our goals. Our goal from the beginning of the season was to go to the playoffs. We didn’t make it, so I think nobody is satisfied in the team. We have to see what went wrong in order to learn the lesson and be better next season,” he said.
On the other side, in the absence of Alexey Shved and Jordan Mickey, Errick McCollum scored 17 points in addition to Egor Vialtsev’s 14 and Sergey Karasev’s 12 points.
The game didn’t have any potential impact on the standings as Khimki ends the season at the bottom of EuroLeague with just four wins (4-30) while Olympiacos improved to 16-18 at the 12th spot.
Georgios Bartzokas noted it is important to finish the year on a positive note but has already set sights on the next season and how to improve.
“First of all, we need to improve our team for next year. We need quality, because the EuroLeague is really tough. With this opportunity, I would like to congratulate the teams that achieved the playoffs and also to those teams who competed in this really tough season, for everybody, really hard. For me, maybe the hardest EuroLeague ever. A lot of good teams and a lot of good players. All this situation with the COVID didn’t help us to get better. We finish with a win, it was important to close the season with a win, but we kind of lost because the importance of the game was not really high,” the coach said.