Ettore Messina: A feeling of confidence in my players didn’t leave me for a second

Getting to the conference hall was much more difficult for Ettore Messina then he expected. On his way to the journalists he had to take a little outside walk down the snow-covered street laid on the territory of Khimki’s arena. Anyway, CSKA Head Coach was satisfied with the result and, what is more important, with the content of his players’ performance:

- Today one pleasant feeling didn’t leave me even for a second – a feeling of confidence in my players. Even when Khimki tried to comeback my guys continued to control the rhythm of the game. And for me it’s much more important then shooting percentage or any other stats. We watched Khimki games against Dinamo Moscow and matches in FIBA Cup so we knew that we needed to eliminate three-point threat with the purpose of winning. Players such as Petrenko, Torres and some others are very hard to stop when they are on fire. Pozzecco is a great player and he showed it again today but don’t ask me about his role in Khimki – it’s a question for his coach, not for me.

- What is wrong with David Andersen?

- He felt pain in his gastrocnemius muscle. It will be determined tomorrow after the tests how long it would take him to recover.

BC Khimki Head Coach Sergei Elevich:

- First of all, I want to mention that CSKA remains a great club as it always was. We worked hard during the preparations to this match. We discussed all the little things of CSKA game. But it didn’t help. Today we faced our bad “perimeter” play. Army men in their turn were very clever on the court – all our attempts to play faster failed. But I thanked my players after the game because they really wanted to win very much. It is impossible for Wolkowyski to do all by himself at the center spot. We will be without Ershov at least for a week and Karaulov isn’t as good as Denis in tactics. Besides we had a lot of away games. We didn’t play at home too often. It is wonderful that there were a lot of supporters at the stadium today. But I think we had some psychological problems as we were very nervous because of the quantity of our fans.