Looks like a team

After showing great team basketball and leaving no chance to Euroleague debutant Panionios CSKA won the second game of the regular season in European top club’s tournament.

Panionios vs. CSKA: 52-86

Ettore Messina, CSKA head coach:

- We had and we still have maximum respect to Panionios. We have seen them playing good game in Madrid and in Greek league. They show great discipline and we knew we should play good game to get the win. Fortunately we played focused, showed good defense and now we go home feeling the importance of the progress we have during latest games.

We’re all happy for Nikos Zisis. It was not his best year and the summer with the National Team was also quite disappointing. Now he uses his ability and plays without putting pressure on himself.

Alexey Savrasenko made obvious step forward to get back his confidence. I hope he will continue to progress and we will have the great combination of big men with Erazem and Alexey.

Alexander Trifunovic:

- Congratulations to CSKA - not only for the win but for the top-level game it showed tonight, especially in defense. It’s not an excuse for us but we have a lot of roster problems. Baxter returned from the hospital just four hours before the game, Raicevic spent a lot of time on medical checking, Kendall had some health problems. So we could not prepare ourselves the best possible way. But as I said that was not the main reason of our loss. We just did not put our effort in right direction, especially in first and third quarters. Instead of defending we tried to score. What could I say if Lorbek scored 17 in 16 minutes of the first half and two players who were on him had just one foul?