Barcelona, so weak in the paint
Every game they play worse. Every week they score less. That’s how you recognize it’s about F.C. Barcelona, a club who disappointed constantly this season, but now they get on the top of being ridiculous. In another article, I spoke about the team’s complex in front of the big opponents, because the always lose badly against squads like Fenerbahce, Real Madrid, CSKA and so on.
This week, at home, they repeated the bad play against Olympiacos. Just 60 points scored by the blaugrana team, which confirmed my critics. The same big “stars” who did nothing against Real Madrid, this time scored together 5 points. It’s about Kevin Pangos (all Euroleague team, last season), Chris Singleton and Kevin Seraphin (with a lot of Nba experience), because I don’t expect Jaka Blazic or Artem Pustovyi to do miracles.
The fact that Ante Tomic had an injury, forced him to play just in the first half of the game a total of 12 minutes. And his absence made the disaster bigger. Olympiacos dominated in the paint, grabbing 43 rebounds compared with just 29 of Barcelona. Nikola Milutinov made his career high (18 points, 14 rebounds and 36 index rate) because there was nobody to defend. The Barca players looked like small children in the kindergarten trying to catch the ball from the big man.
The big hope of Barcelona, ex-NBA center Kevin Seraphin who is injured most of the games had another pathetic presence on the court: he made 4 fouls in just 7 minutes for -4 efficiency.
I speak a lot about the index rating because it reflects even better than the score the huge difference between this 2 teams. Imagine that only Milutinov had almost the same efficiency rate (36) as the whole Barcelona team (42)!
Things have to change. I was hoping that with the retiring of Juan Carlos Navarro, Barcelona will catch a fresh spirit, rejuvenating and breaking some records. Instead of this, they broke the records of laziness, stupidity and mediocrity.
Gratian Cormos, info@brainbasketball.net
