By Antonis Stroggylakis/ info@eurohoops.net
If it wasn’t enough that AS Monaco had just suffered a heartbreaking loss to Olympiacos Piraeus in an exhilarating Game 5 of the EuroLeague playoffs, the players of the Monegasque side needed to go on a small adventure to take their bus back to the hotel.
After quite the wait in the locker room, Monaco players had to walk a long way through the Peace and Friendship Stadium corridors in order to leave the gym. They couldn’t reach their bus via the usual route and arena exit since the parking lot where the vehicle would normally be was flooded by a horde of Olympiacos fans who were waiting to cheer their own team for the qualification to the Final Four.
Monaco was escorted by police and riot squad as a safety precaution, an unprecedented experience for most of these guys, including former NBAer Donatas Motiejunas. Yet the Lithuanian big man did not mind the whole ordeal while finding some strange charm in it.
“It’s OK. It’s Europe. I grew up here. It’s fun. It’s part of the basketball,” Motiejunas told Eurohoops. “In some ways, beautiful. You can call me crazy but it’s beautiful in some ways.”
Save for simply giving their congratulations to Olympiacos for the win, most Monaco players weren’t in the mood for game talk and didn’t feel like going into any analysis of what transpired in the match after suffering this kind of defeat in an elimination battle. Unfazed by the roaring Red & White crowd, Sasa Obradovic‘s players led even by 11 points in the first half and were in control for the larger part of the match before their opponents made consecutive baskets down the stretch to take the lead and preserve it until the very end.
“We failed defensively. That was the biggest part of the whole thing,” Motiejunas said. “We gave up many points in such an important game. We know we can score. We had to contain Olympiacos and control how much there would score against us. We should’ve stopped Olympiacos from scoring. We failed to do that.”
After Olympiacos erased their deficit and returned to the game for good in the fourth period, it all came down to simply which team would hit the buckets that mattered as crunch time approached. The Reds were the ones to do so, courtesy of Kostas Sloukas and Tyler Dorsey, in a final quarter that their team won 28 – 18.
“We missed the shots,” Motiejunas said. “That was very important for us. At the same time, Olympiacos scored those shots. The fans got behind them and it wasn’t easy to stop them.”
Despite the bitterness of this result, the overall aftertaste that the 2021-22 EuroLeague season leaves to Monaco should be sweet. Sure, they didn’t make the Final Four and rightfully felt bad about but the overall campaign was nothing less than a bona fide success.
In its first-ever appearance in EuroLeague, Monaco navigated through a tough early run to stay competitive and relevant in the playoff conversations. When a head coach change occurred in December and Obradovic took over, the team raised the level of its performance and went on to register 10 wins over 13 games (excluding the matches vs. Russian teams that were annulled) in 2022 to make the postseason.
The odds were against them vs. an Olympiacos squad that also had the valuable homecourt advantage. Yet Monaco put up a major fight to win a game in near-impregnable Peace and Friendship, reacted to the home loss in Game 3 by forcing a return to Greece and ultimately got two-three shots away from the Final Four.
“I think it’s amazing,” Motiejunas said. He was a factor in Monaco making the playoffs with 10.8 points and 4.8 rebounds in the regular season and during his return to Europe after nine years. “I remember at the beginning of the season when we met in the training camp, most of the guys weren’t even there. Some of the guys joined right after the preseason. It was tough to get into a rhythm. But we made it all the way to the playoffs. We were coming in as underdogs. Regardless, we were ready to fight. Of course, it’s upsetting that we lost but Olympiacos just showed that they were the better team.”
“In the end, really, congrats to Olympiacos,” Motiejunas added. “It was amazing series and they won.”
Game 5 had everything that a basketball fan could ask for and far more in the VIP seats. Academy Award winner and likely new Olympiacos fan Emma Stone was there while NBA superstar Kevin Durant also attended the match to support his former Brooklyn Nets teammate Mike James after being present also in Game 4 in Monaco.
“The apocalypse,” Durant wrote in a tweet with a video he took of Olympiacos fans lighting up flares, throwing firecrackers and jumping into the court in revelry even before the final buzzer.
“Right now he [KD] saw the real passion of basketball in Europe,” Motiejunas said. “Greeks, Lithuanians, Serbians, we are crazy about it. It really shows the culture, the love that we have for the game. I hope that he enjoyed it.”