Not a word about Final Four

‘It does not matter what I would say. You would write that our goal is to win the Euroleague’, - mentioned CSKA head coach Ettore Messina answering one of the questions on the press conference during the media day. And these words express the atmosphere of in the hall better than any other. But neither CSKA CEO Sergey Kushchenko nor Ettore Messina did not say the phrase desired. Even when journalists put the question in a way like: ‘Dusan Ivkovic had three years to build the team and to try to reach the trophy. What period of time does Messina have?’, the CSKA bosses tried to convince mass media representatives that in the upcoming season the club has other goals to reach and problems to fix.

Among them are the improvement of the Army clubs system, training of the young players, work with the veterans, not to mention the progress CSKA should make in the show. Messina thinks that RFB rule of no less than two Russian players on the court can help the basketball in the country in general. It also motivates the club to have some young talents on the roster. In CSKA they are Shabalkin, Zavoruev, Kashirov. But also this makes the club to built a system and even from this point of view the selection of the team should be analyzed. As for the result, at the start of the season the team would be more focused on the defence and the offence would start to play its role only in spring. The club tried to sign the contracts with the smart players who can play team basketball.

Veterans also can help the team in the current situation. It is important to train the young players with their examples. In order to help the former players to improve their living CSKA established the monthly grant for 9 of them. But by the way information on the grants was issued a bit after the conference – at the meeting with the fans.

As for the Euroleague, according to Messina, it is harder to get to the Final Four then to win games in there.’I know that in here it does not sound well, but according to my experience it happens like this, - says the head coach. – But any way it is hard to predict from the very start which goal would be achieved by the team. For example, when we had in Kinder Ginobili and Co we thought to win the Euroleague in 3 seasons but get the title at once. But there is a lot of opposed examples’.