By Eurohoops team/ info@eurohoops.net
Barcelona got the valuable road win against Lokomotiv Kuban and now with two games in Palau Blaugrana has the chance to get the upper hand.
As Lokomotiv Kuban’s coach Giorgos Bartzokas admitted: “Obviously, it was a hard night for us. This is a bad loss, a very bad loss. Of course, Barcelona had a great performance tonight. We allowed then, I think, to do whatever they wanted during the game. That is why they felt confident from the beginning and finally they shot with these unrealistic percentages for this kind of game – 60-something percent for three. Barcelona is this kind of team – a team with many players who can score a lot on a good day. The problem for us is that our defense was not consistent, not forcing them into turnovers or bad shots. Anyway, I agree with Malcolm, but like I said after winning Game 1, you have to control the emotions in this kind of series, no matter if you win or lose.
We have to go to Barcelona and take at least one game to come back here again. It is not going to be easy, but until now, as you know, in the regular season and Game 1 of the playoffs, we had three very tight games against Barcelona.
Only this one we saw that we were not ready to play. First of all, we were not mentally ready to play this game; we had many turnovers, didn’t follow our game plan and played on the ball a lot, not moving and passing the ball as we always do. Let’s be positive; personally, I am. I will try to convince the players that this is the key: control your emotions and get ready for the next game. We are not a team that everybody expected to be competing in the Euroleague in mid-April. We have to enjoy our participation in the playoffs, but also fight for every defense, every offense in every game until we finish. We are going to do our best in Barcelona.”
Coach Xavi Pascual denied that Barcelona should be considered the favorite: “We are very happy with this win and with the game we played today. I believe we played a very good game in all aspects of the game. We were really good on defense and that allowed us to have rhythm and play well on offense. Moreover, we had good shooting percentages tonight. We know that the series is just 1-1, but it was very important for us to win tonight and get back in the series, now that we are taking it to Barcelona. Having rhythm in the game is very important for us. It has been important all season and sometimes we don’t manage to do it. It is even more important in a game like this. Having deeper teams, or coaches using more players or less players, have its positive and negative things, but Lokomotiv won Game 1 and we won Game 2.
Maybe fans think that we are now the favorites in this series, they can read it that way. Things are not like that for us.
We have a lot of respect and admiration for Lokomotiv and its coach, and know we will have to give our best to win Game 3. We will see in which situation we are after that game. Playing on the road, being so important and playing so well, it was our best game in the Euroleague this season.”
As for guard Tomas Satoransky who was one of the best players of the winners, he added: “I think we were much more aggressive than in the first game. We wanted to play with a lot of rhythm because we have, I think, a lot of rotation, a lot of players who can play equal minutes. We tried to run and score a lot of fast break points today, which we didn’t do in the first game. I think Games 3 and 4 are going to be two battles because this team is great. We have a lot of respect for Lokomotiv. We are a good, physical team that plays great defense. We have to keep going. We tried to switch on defense and tried to run from the beginning, and this is what we did. They came back but we kept playing our style of basketball and of course, had a good three-point shooting percentage but above all, we were much more aggressive than in Game 1. That was the key.
Now it is going to be another tough battle in Game 3 in our home, but we are happy with how we played this game. Our goal is to finish the series in Barcelona, but we have big respect for this team.
It is going to be tough; they will be ready again and it will be very difficult to score against them because they will be much more physical. That is our goal, to repeat this in our home court. It was the point of coming here.”