Bologna, April 1st –
At the end of the game against Estra Pistoia, valid for Round 25 of LBA, these were the words of coach Luca Banchi: “I want to congratulate Pistoia for the game they played, enhanced by this last quarter by percentages that are difficult to repeat. We tried to find the right intensity and aggressiveness without ever stopping the accuracy of their shooters, this generated a bad psychological reaction because clearly having seen them recover this gap so quickly took away lucidity from our offense that up to that moment had managed to be effective at certain regimes that were certainly not the ones I hoped we would be able to address in the arc of the game. In our plan there was certainly trying to control the pace, we got carried away in a run-and-gun that was then lethal in the final.
A second half of 59 points conceded and a last period of 32 with certain shooting percentages, overall with 11 of 12 from the field testify that we were never able to stop their precision, incisiveness and aggressiveness. This is a team that has been playing with this edge since the beginning of the season, with this confidence that you have to be good at controlling. If for 30 minutes we managed to keep them at arm’s length, some sign that our defense did not have the intensity was already there, and after all it manifested itself in a bursting way, abetted by the fact that the confidence grew in them that possession after possession they were making up the gap.”
“Pistoia played with a very low number of turnovers, we were in risky territory. The 19-point lead makes you believe that by maintaining certain scoring regimes you can still hold them off. We stumbled into a fourth period of utter sterility, with palpable tension on the court. We lost confidence and began to see the basket really small, this gave our opponents additional drive and energy. The feeling was that we built the lead in the offensive half of the court rather than the defensive half. We rotated 12 players on the court, I think for the team that we are and the quintets that we propose, we should not go digging into the area of fatigue and tiredness, rather on the fact that we could not find answers to their scoring streak. It all manifested itself a bit blatantly in the last period and this had a psychological significance. Even subconsciously you think it’s a game that can continue on that inertia, that you can anchor on your percentages and the ease with which we had found a good distribution between inside play and accuracy from the arc. All of a sudden it became difficult, the basket closed in, with Pistoia getting more and more entrenched inside the area challenging us to shoot and it became lethal along with their shooting percentages which are not everyday.”
On Cordinier and Hackett: “After coming through the locker room, Daniel specifically asked to come back in and have a chance to play. It did not seem to me that he was particularly limited, let’s see what will happen in the next few hours. As for Cordinier, it’s a more complex matter, we hoped the injury would be resolved in a shorter time, then actually there are slowdowns that make me be pessimistic about the possibility of recovering him soon.”
