Finale with a victory
Pre-season games for Olympiacos ended the way they started. That is with a victory. The “reds” beat Zalgiris 86 – 75 in the small final of the “Gomelsky Cup” and dropped the curtain on their pre-season training with a win.
Giorgos Barztokas’ team showed from the beginning that wanted to dominate the game and playing excellent defense in the most part, controlled the rhythm and never lost control of the game, with Perperoglou and Dorsey being its best players.
Τhe quarters: 24-11, 43-32, 66-49, 86-75.
Olympiacos (Bartzokas): Hines 3, Spanoulis 7(1), Perperoglou 16, Dorsey 8, Sloukas 10(2), Mavroeidis 4, Gecevicius 1, Printezis 20(2), Papanikolaou 11(1), Mantzaris 3(1), Katsivelis 3.
Zalgiris Kaunas (Plaza): Darden 4, Popovic 7, D. Lavrinovic 10, Juskevicius 2, Kalnietis 3, Lipkevicius 2, Klimavicius 10, Jankunas 3, Delas 6, Kuzminsaks 4, Kaukenas 11, Foote 13.
GIORGOS BARZTOKAS: I would really like to thank CSKA and the organizers for the tournament. We played two excellent friendly games. We reacted well tonight and it’s important that we talked in the morning and showed that we left last night’s game behind us. This is very important at such a level. We used various rotations tonight which are not the usual for us, like having three guards in the same team and playing with Kyle at the power position, since we did not have Acie Law and Pero Antic with us. We are not 100% ready for the beginning of the season. We pushed our players quite a lot all these days and we played friendly games against champion teams like CSKA, Siena, Maccabi and Bamberg. We tried a lot, but we still need to correct a lot of things, especially at defense.
GIORGOS PRINTEZIS: Tonight we reacted very well after last night’s not so good game. We played better at defense and had a better concentration. We need to quickly forget about last season and start from scratch. We have to work on a daily basis and improve things especially in defense.
JUAN PLAZA: We played against the European Champion, a team with great experience. We are not disappointed, of course we did not give our best, but we are going to learn from this game. Olympiacos left unpunished none of the 21 turnovers we made tonight. I wish them the best.
TANTA KLIMAVICIUS: We really wanted to win this, just like we did last night. We are looking forward and we keep working at practice. What we want is to win games when the season starts.