MADRID, 20 Feb. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Real Madrid basketball coach, Pablo Laso, congratulated his team for doing “a very good job” in the Copa del Rey final despite the defeat against Barça and assured that he could not be “dissatisfied”, although he did admit that they lacked “offensive quality at key moments”.
“I would like to congratulate Barça on their victory. It was a game in which I think we did a very good job in general terms, but where I have the feeling that we lacked offensive quality at key moments,” Laso said at a press conference after the match. final.
The man from Vitoria lamented that “easy baskets, open shots, even with an advantage on the scoreboard, and also Gaby Deck’s last penetration” failed. “During the game we lacked that success, but we have to give credit to the team, we arrived with many physically fair players and they gave everything, I’m proud of them,” he said.
“For me, each game, regardless of victory or defeat, is different, but we have been good in aspects of the game that are important to us, such as defense and rebounding. We have lacked success at key moments, but I am not leaving dissatisfied, I can’t be,” added the Madrid coach.
He believes that looking at the quarters it was “a match from more to less” for his team and “probably from less to more” for Sarunas Jasikevicius’s, but he did not have “the feeling” that they were long. “We had the ball to equalize with seconds to go. What was clear to me was that we would not win easily or that it would be broken, that it would be a play-by-play and action-by-action match,” he stressed.
Laso reiterated that his team was “defensively very good” and that the “only moment” where his rival was able to work was “in two consecutive actions by Jokubaitis”, although he did not hide that the 59 points scored were “not much” for it. “We have had little success and little running, perhaps we paid for the effort of the defensive work, but it is decided in the final plays and we had less success than them,” he said, noting that both Tavares and Poirier did “a great job defensively and offensively.”
Finally, he showed his regret for the physical problems of these days, which in the final had Adam Hanga as the protagonist. “In the last week we have lost a player for the entire season (Alocén), another for two or three weeks (Causeur) and we have what is Hanga’s. We will test him this Monday and hopefully it will only be a hit, In principle, I couldn’t return to the game,” he said.