BASKETBALL

Post-game comments - Igor Kokoskov

05 February 2021 Friday 23:38

This is a very good Zenit team, they play with a lot of confidence and they changed the game. In coaching slang we say they ‘jumped the game’ with their zone defense in the first couple of possessions, protecting their guards. It took us a while to regroup and get organised better. We keep saying we have to defend to run and we didn’t find those stops in the first half. A lot of mental mistakes, and we didn’t close the game well in crunch time. In critical times we were turning over the ball way too easily. We have to be smarter, we have to play hard and smart to close games like this. But credit to the players, they are competing and fighting, and we’ll take it. The only thing we care about is scoring one point more than the other team. Sometimes you can control the pace of the game, but we don’t care. We can play slow or fast, as long as we’re winning games we’re fine.