Defeating Spain’s Herbalife Gran Canaria team 93-74 in the 22nd-week match Turkish Airlines Euroleague, Anadolu Efes head coach Ergin Ataman shared his thoughts at the post-game press conference:
“We started the match well. We played aggressively and raised the tempo as we prepared for this match. We scored with fast-breaks. We missed the fast-break points at the beginning of the second half, even we scored for once out of 6 fast-breaks at this part of the match. Our defensive aggressiveness started to drop and we’ve lost our rhythm. Gran Canaria’s bigs are good at pick&rolls, so we planned our bigs to stay in the painted area. So, Hannah and Eriksson started to score easy points. We’ve changed our defence strategy during the second half. We’ve played tougher. We’ve matched Micic to Hannah and Doğuş to Eriksson and with Dunston used higher balls, with that they were out of their game. We’ve grabbed the ball and caught back our tempo. When we started to play with our own tempo we’ve reached to our real Euroleague shooting percentage. We’ve received a clear win via turning the second half into easy when it was thought to be tough half.”