Bologna, May 7 –
Coach Scariolo spoke in the press conference after the win over Varese: “It was a somewhat atypical game, the objectives were different, we had to give space to some, take it away from others, give moral confidence to some. These objectives were met: some things we tried went well, on others we work so that they go better with some adjustments. I congratulate Varese and Coach Brase for the excellent season and the good work they have done. On our side we have the satisfaction that for the second year in a row none of us has won more league games, beyond the basket difference for which we congratulate Milan for first place. Now we will breathe a little and start preparing for the playoffs not with medical choices but with technical choices, which has never happened this year.”
Teodosic’s absence? “He is devastating, not in winning one or two more games but in rearranging the team, when he is there he completely changes the way the team plays, which is built for him to be there. He’s had literally all of them, he’s decisive: in the last two months we’ve hardly had him and we’ve tried to hold our own, even winning in Milan. Now we’re going to have to put him right back in, readjusting everyone at the tactical and team-building level. We are here to fight and we will fight. He had first his historical hip problem, then his calf problem, then the flu, they were not relapses. He’s been able to be with the team very little, certainly now we’re going to try to raise his range which is what it is now but we’re going to try to raise it by playing, which exposes the team to a very high risk because we’re going to have to give a loose reins to a player who’s not fit because he has to get into form. We have to go through this valley, hopefully one round of the playoffs will be enough for that.”
Ojeleye and Shengelia together? “In the playoffs we will definitely play with two fives until proven otherwise, two foreign players since unfortunately we have no Italians to rotate in that role, two foreigners apart from Toko who is immovable, Jordan is. Mam has taken an advantage but it is not set in stone, we will evaluate the performance, the workouts, the opponents, the game plans at the tactical level, the other positions are quite defined in future progression, especially when we play against teams of size that are not for example Treviso who played with five outside, with Sorokas who is 2.02 and whom we could not mark because he carried our five very far from the basket, there we buffered but it may be the exception, not the rule.”
The mistakes in the first half? “In the NBA there is a statistic called shot quality or point-per-shot expectation, which calculates how many points you can expect from a shot and is the true index of a team’s production quality. If we all year round evaluate by this aspect we would have won 15 more games: the construction of shots, from outside and from underneath, throughout the year was very high, unfortunately there was often a wide gap between what was supposed to happen and what happened in reality. Today nothing different happened however let’s say that’s the annual trend, in one month it doesn’t change that much. We’ve historically created an avalanche of high-percentage shots and we haven’t always scored the same way.”
