Baskonia Vitoria vs. CSKA: 76-73 (-3)
Baskonia: Vildoza (6 + 5 as), Janning (13 + 3 rb + 3 as), Poirier (18 + 8 rb + 2 st), Shengelia (15 + 8 rb + 3 as), Shields (9 + 5 rb) – start; Gonzalez (DNP), Voigtmann (2 + 3 rb + 3 as), Huertas (4 + 4 as), Diop (0), Granger (1), Hilliard (8)…
CSKA: De Colo (2 + 5 as), Peters (20 + 2 as), Hackett (6 + 4 rb), Kurbanov (5 + 4 rb + 3 as), Hunter (6 + 6 rb) – start; Bolomboy (0), Antonov (0), Rodriguez (3 + 5 as), Vorontsevich (0), Higgins (17 + 4 rb + 3 as), Kulagin (DNP), Hines (14 + 7 rb)…
Dimitris Itoudis, CSKA head coach:
I would like to congratulate Baskonia for the win. The game was close until the last moments and could have gone either way. They had better composure at the end. We had a lot of good open looks, it was not our good shooting day, but we got to give credit to Baskonia for what they did on the boards. They outrebounded us in the second half 24-14. That is huge. In the third quarter, we had a good lead of 5 points in such a close game, but we gave Janning two easy three-pointers. That is his quality, we cannot allow such a shooter to go off. But if you are making shots you have a huge advantage, and today we were poor beyond the arc although we had good looks and although Alec was in range, 5-of-12 is not that good for such a caliber shooter. We practice with him, we know he can make it better. But we had other good looks that we did not make, and we will make them for sure down the stretch. What concerns us more is rebounding and losing balls, but defensively we managed to keep a high-quality offensive team under 80 points.
