Bartzokas: «We should have played harder»
The coach of Olympiacos, Giorgos Bartzokas, attributed the loss to the catastrophic 2nd quarter as well as to the lack of toughness.
“Congratulations to CSKA for the victory. They played excellent and deserved to win. As for us, it’s obvious that the second quarter was catastrophic. We played without concentrations and toughness and allowed our opponent to get that difference. Despite that we won all three other quarters we won the partial scores, it wasn’t enough for us to get the victory. I was expecting that we would have a compact defensive presence, however, this was not the case on all forty minutes. Clyburn was exceptional and Lundberg also, but for me, Bolomboy was a very significant asset. He played an exceptional game. We should have played better defense on these players. We should have been tougher and especially in the second quarter, we weren’t. Just like everyone else, we have a tough schedule and we need to get immediately ready for the next game”.
Asked by a Russian reporter why he did not use Tyler Dorsey in the second quarter, the ‘reds’ coach replied: “Do you think he can play at this level for forty minutes? He played thirty minutes and he did not play the second quarter. That’s a coach’s decision. Sometimes it’s the right one, other times not so. Judging from the result, you can say a lot after everything has played out. We have many good players and if you see at our guard in the second quarter, they played well. I need to have faith in my players. It’s not just one game, it’s a whole season, so I always need to have trust in everyone on my team”.