By Antonis Stroggylakis / info@eurohoops.net
Zenit St. Petersburg registered its first-ever EuroLeague win by beating Olympiacos Piraeus on the road 68-77 in overtime. The Greek side fell to 1-2, one week after routing Valencia in the same arena.
Mateusz Ponitka scored a game-high 18 points to pace Zenit, including the key 3-point play for the 67 – 73 with 80 seconds left. On the other end, the Polish wing blocked Kevin Punter’s lay-up attempt to preserve a precious, and ultimately game-winning distance for the visiting side.
“It’s a great honor to get this win against Olympiacos, a great team. It’s true that we did pretty good things against Barcelona and even against Berlin, but we didn’t put together a complete game like today. We were out of the game early, we came back to it soon and competed until the end. I feel proud of the players”, Zenit coach Joan Plaza said in the post-game presser.
Punter (16 points), along with Nikola Milutinov (16 points, 14 rebounds, 30 PIR) led Olympiacos in scoring. The American guard was 2/12 from beyond the arc while his team overall finished with 6/30 triples.
Kostas Papanikolaou had forced the extra period by hitting a 3-pointer to tie the game at 64 with eight seconds remaining in regulation. The bucket capped a comeback from 10 points down for the Reds, yet the squad didn’t translate that momentum in overtime. Coach Joan Plaza’s team dominated the extra five 4 – 13 to leave “Peace and Friendship” arena with a triumph.
Zenit had taken a 38 – 48 lead in the mid of the third period after making a complete turnaround following a 12-0 entrance by Olympiacos. The Russian team went ahead 19 – 20 at the end of the first quarter following a buzzer-beating triple by Vladislav Trushkin and managed to close halftime up 36 – 38 thanks to a lay-up by Tim Abromaitis.
Gustavo Ayon added 10 points and 10 rebounds for Zenit while Alex Renfroe had 10 points.
Kemzura: We had a lot of problems to be able to control
For Olympiacos coach Kestutis Kemzura, the shooting struggles of his team compiled just one part of a bigger offensive issue.
“We had a lot of problems to be able to take control, to run our offense as we wanted, and were not playing with the right angles, with the right timing. We didn’t move the ball well, our offense was too static in some moments,” Kemzura said in the presser.
“We were able to tie the game to go to overtime with two threes but we couldn’t go further in overtime. We couldn’t do more to win the game. We missed small things, we turned the ball over too many times, and that way it’s quite difficult to win a game,” he added.
Photo credit: EuroLeague