Dinamo Sassari had a lot of rest before the encounter with Turk Telekom
Dinamo Sassari had a lot of rest before the encounter with Turk Telekom
The second round of Basketball Champions League will continue today with some interesting matches. After last night results, we expect another night with good matches or unexpected results. The match I will focus on is Turk Telekom vs Dinamo Sassari. On paper, the match is very balanced and so the odds are. But let’s see who are the favourite for this game and why.
Turk’s season started well with a 3-2 record, one of the losses came against Euroleague powerhouse Fenerbahce Beko Istanbul. In the first round of Champions League, they get an important win against Hapoel Holon in Israel, 79-82. In that match, the starting five and the sixth man player scored 75 points and those stats shows us how short Turk’s roster are. In the last game in TBL against Tofas, they lost the game 81-72, but guess why? Tofas won the last quarter 21-10 because Telekom’s important players were exhausted and shot the ball only to try their luck. In this game, only 8 players played more than 10 minutes, with the starting players playing many minutes. And the most important thing the game was on Saturday, while Dinamo had a free weekend. This is a big problem for them and I don’t know how they will overcome this heavy schedule with such a short rotation.
On the other hand, as I said before, Dinamo had a free weekend, their last game was on last Wednesday against Lietkabelis in Champions League. They managed to win that game in the last seconds, 79-78. Dyshawn Pierre had an amazing night finishing with 24 points and 12 rebounds, while Dwayne Evans had 14 points and Miro Bilan 10 points. Dinamo Sassari had a 9 men rotation with at least 16 minutes on the field for every player. They are in a very good form with a 4-1 record in both competitions until now and also won the Italian SuperCup at the beginning of the season.
As a conclusion, Dinamo will win the game. They have a better roster, but the most important thing, they have better bench players that can help and provide some good stats. They don’t have to use their starting players 33+ minutes on the court every match like Turk Telekom does. Also, Sassari had more time to rest and prepare for this game, while Turk played in the weekend an exhausting match against a good team, Tofas.
Photo: championsleague.basketball
Bogdan Vasile Tirc
