Destroyed by Siska’s gun

There is no place for the fairy tales in the red-blue battle. Reality wins. The best game in the season by Barcelona’s Andersen was spoiled by the brilliant game by Siskauskas, who just destroyed the opponents in the final quarter.

Barcelona vs. CSKA: 78-82

Ettore Messina:

"We are very happy to have reached the Euroleague final for the fourth consecutive year. It is a big reward for the club, our players and our coaching staff. At the same time, I think we beat an excellent Barcelona that played excellent early in the game. They had a lot of weapons on the court for a long time, led by an excellent David Andersen, who played another great game in his career. The key was not to panic after a horrible start and we slowly managed to put the game in the halfcourt, like we knew we liked. At the same time, with 82 points scored, I think that if I am not wrong, we had more rebounds and a better three-point percentage. We thought those were the biggest keys to this game, especially, as these are their strongest weapons. We managed to control this and obviously made great plays, especially Siskauskas, in the second half. I would like to make it simple, this is what great players are for, you expect that they do something for you. I tried a small lineup in the fourth quarter, a decision I took during the game. I thought that we had to spread the offense to help Siskauskas to drive to the basket. I also thought that we needed Viktor Khryapa's quickness at power forward. Viktor was the key for us to win. He did a lot of things to make us win the game. At the same time, in the fourth quarter he rebounded very well. David scored only 2 points against him after being a problem for 34 or 35 minutes. We did not try anything new by using Sasha Kaun so early in the game. We did that in the Russian League and in both friendlies with Efes, and he responded well. The plan was to use him along with Erazem Lorbek together, using Lorbek at the four. Because of his two quick fouls, he had to play immediately and I think he responded pretty well. I took him out only he was very tired. I expected a very good game from Andersen, but also from Navarro and Lakovic. At the same time, we knew we had a size advantage against both of them. It was a problem for them to play defense on Langdon or Siskauskas.

I was afraid that my players would have a slow start because as you know, we have not played a strong game in April. I knew we would have a very difficult start and that is what happened. After that horrible start, as time went by we were into the game. Even in timeouts it was very easy to communicate with players, so they were not affected by the crowd. They will be affected on Sunday, for sure.

We were patient, despite getting behind by a lot early, against a great Barcelona team, with great shooters. We were patient and didn't panic, and even if our first half was not that nice, we came back and evened the score. In the second half, we had more movement and focused on taking advantage of the great night of Siskauskas.”