Analyzing the stupid game made by Zaragoza in BasketballCL
Last night Casademont Zaragoza struggled to beat at home Happy Casa Brindisi. The Italian side came without their main scorer Adrian Banks so it has to be an easy game for the team that Sunday destroyed Real Madrid by 17. If concentration and respect for the ball would have guided Zaragoza’s squad, I would have expected a victory by over 20 points. Can you compare Real Madrid with this squad from Italy who rely almost on 4 Americans, helped from the bench by average Italian youngsters?
The truth is Zaragoza played the most chaotic basketball ever. They didn’t care about the ball, shooting a lot and missing everything, because they weren’t organized in offense. They look like amateur selfish ballers, playing without any discipline, practising an embarrassing ‘run and gun’ who proved to very inefficient. And the defense of the Spaniards was lower than juniors’ level, allowing Brindisi to take many uncontested shots.
In the end, after 2 overtimes, helped by the referees, Zaragoza won against a team that had 4 fellows eliminated with 5 fouls each and other 3 had 4 fouls. The entire rotation of Brindisi was 8 players and from those 8, 7 were eliminated or almost eliminated from the game! And in these circumstances, Zaragoza won only by a small margin, with a lot of luck! How silly is that?
The enormous luck of Zaragoza was that the visitors missed a lot of free-throws finishing with 21/36 from the line. But the host team had the same problem, missing even more free-throws (27/43). The so praised Rodrigo San Miguel and Robin Benzing ended the game with negative index rate, while the new acquisition of Zaragoza, Dylan Ennis was a ball consumer having very poor percentages: 3/12 at 2 pointers, and 3/11 from the arc. I understand that Rodrigo San Miguel is old, but which small guard on the planet will miss 4 from 4 at the free-throws? Not even Nick Calathes!
Zaragoza looked last night like a team that has no coach and no tactics. Instead, we saw on the court 12 players who took many desperate shots, some of them from 9 meters away from the basket. The whole game was a total mess from the Spanish side without any ball movement to create an open space for the shooter. It was a huge disappointment for the 10 000 fans that came to support Zaragoza.
Photo: championsleague.basketball
Gratian Cormos
