Maccabi Tel Aviv will be hosted tonight (Thursday, 21:00) in Lithuania for a meeting against Zalgiris Kaunas, whose situation is not alarming when it comes to the fight for entry into the playoffs, however it is in a much better position compared to Yannis Sapropoulos’ players, who are five minutes away Games and 7 points from Zenit. Martin Schiller’s players are in 11th place, two games away from eighth place.
The meeting between the teams will be the 27th since 2000, 13 games were played on Lithuanian soil with the Yellows winning seven of them. At the same time, Maccabi Tel Aviv’s last away win in Kaunas was in the 2016/17 season. Sapropoulos’ team will miss Othello Hunter who remains in the country due to leg pain, but this will not be the first time the Yellows will miss Othello Hunter who will complete a second season with the national champion without playing against Zalgiris even once. Hunter also missed the game in the first round, when last year he also missed the only meeting between the teams in Lithuania.
Ahead of the game the Euroleague website has chosen Scotty Wilbkin and Marius Grigonis as the main matchup of the game, the reason for this is very simple and it is shooting from the outside, the two reach the 31st round of the Euroleague with Scotty Wilbkin leading the list of threes with 71 accurate shots, Grigonis is ranked Third (equal to Alexei Sheved Mahimaki) with 66 successful shots he scored in 46.8%, the highest percentage in the competition among anyone who scored at least 50 threes this season. In the previous meeting between the teams, Maccabi scored 11 3-pointers by 52.4% against one single three-pointer by the Lithuanians, scored by Marius Grigonis.
From the Lithuanian side, coach of Zalgiris, Martin Schiller He said ahead of the game: “Maccabi is a very dominant team in terms of guards, they play with several ball carriers, up to three who are on the floor at the same time. They can also win the game with their outside scorers like Dragan Bender who plays in position five. Maccabi also improved. Her defense throughout the season and they have some good defensive players like Bryant, Cloiaro, Žižić or Jones. “
Lucas to Cabicius He added: “Every important game in the Euroleague, we are confident that Maccabi comes to this game with the desire to win and we should be ready to fight. We lost the early game by a high margin already in the first half, so we need to be focused from the start of the game and be focused and ready for their aggressive defense.”
Sequence after sequence, from defeat to defeat
Zalgiris Kaunas Model 2020/21 is a set of habits and sequences. For every winning streak he also deserved a losing streak, for every early optimistic prediction he also deserved such a pessimistic one, for every victory that brought Zalgiris closer to what could be considered unbelievable this year given the circumstances, he also deserved a loss. There were moments when Zalgiris was in great shape, for the first time it was stopped with a loss to Valencia which was actually the beginning of the first losing streak (despite the win over Willerban) which culminated in a resounding defeat at Menora Mivtachim Hall.
The team’s second winning streak began in Greece against Panathinaikos and was stopped by a loss away to CSKA, since Martin Schiller’s Lithuanian team continued to mature only as the streaks shortened, and for tonight’s game the Austrian coach’s team comes with a somewhat symbolic balance of 15 wins against 15 losses and a negative basket ratio. Can hint at the story of the Turkish teams and their connection to tonight’s game.
Zalgiris Kaunas hosted Anadolu Zero at the start of the season, at a time when Argin Ataman’s team was not only far from peaking, moreover they did not even look like the shadow of the same team that was already last season considered one of the favorites to win the Euroleague. At the end of 40 minutes of basketball in Zalgario in front of 5011 spectators, it was the Greens who defeated Anadolu Zero by 16 points in the fourth round. In the 15th round it was Fenerbahce who felt the power of the Lithuanian machine on the way to an absolute disintegration at 37 points.
Defeats are a strange thing, certainly in the current Euroleague season, and certainly among teams competing for the top 8 or for a place among the top four that gives the home advantage the age where it seems that home does not exactly exist. Anadolu was defeated by CSKA by 35 points just to beat the Russian team by 30 points in the second round. Zalgiris, who defeated Ataman’s trainees in 16, “retired” to Schiller’s team by 27 points. Fenerbahce, who snatched 37, Managed to return with 23 points to Zalgiris, who lost by a margin of 28 points in Tel Aviv.