This is what the protagonists of the game had to say after the dust settled.
Radonjic on Zvezda win: "Good game, defensively and offensively"
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4 mins read
Dejan Radonjic, Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade
“Congratulations to my players for the win and the really good game. We have had so many problems in our first games of the season. We are still in almost the same situation. But we played a really good game defensively and offensively. To win here you have to be ready to play at both ends. It’s always nice to play in a great atmosphere and today it was a big challenge for us to play against Maccabi in front of fans. I hope we can get some of our players back soon because playing a small rotation with the schedule will be difficult for us.”
Nikola Kalinic, Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade
“We played tough. We tried to play good defense. We put a lot of pride in it. We are feeling good right now. We just need to keep playing like this and give our best in every game and we’ll see. I think today was great and I believe we can keep playing like this.”
Nate Wolters, Crvena Zvezda mts Belgrade
"We just needed a road win early in the year. It’s always good to win on the road. We have a lot of guys out right now. It’s been a tough situation early in the year, but we played really well tonight and played good defense and didn’t let them get in a rhythm all night.”
Ioannis Sfairopoulos, Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv
“We want to congratulate our opponents because they played a better game tonight. We knew that it is a tough team. We said that they play very good on defense. I think the most important thing for us was first that we didn’t start the game very good. We had 8 turnovers in the first quarter. We scored only 10 points. We played their rhythm even though we discussed it and analyzed it and said we didn’t want that to happen. I think after they got a double-digit lead we got frustrated and nervous. And that caused some of the bad decisions offensively and defensively. We showed during the game a lot of miscommunication on defense, a lot of bad position and spacing on offense. But we had some moments where we could score and maybe change the momentum of the game. That didn’t happen. We tried until the end to fight - as you can see from us scoring 26 points in the last period. But it was too difficult to come back. It’s a bad game, a bad loss. Unfortunately, it happened in front of our fans. We wanted to protect our home court, but it's a long way to go. It’s too early to cry. We have to work harder to improve our game, learn from our mistakes, learn a lot from this game and play much better the next games.”
Angelo Caloiaro, Maccabi Playtika Tel Aviv
“Offensively we struggled, especially in the first quarter. We already had 8 turnovers. I think we let our offensive struggles and the way the game was slowed down the game tempo get into our defense. And our defense wasn’t great either.”