Dimitris Diamantidis was bumped a position in the Greek League statistics categories lists. Dishing thrice to his teammates in the encounter at the “Alexandrio” stadium versus Aris he reached 1,065 assists and is currently in second place on the best ball distributers’ list. He left Nikos Vetoulas behind (1,093) having only Angelos Koronios to catch up with who poses at top spot behind 1,264 perfect passes.
*Panathinaikos has a scheduled training for this evening at OAKA since on Tuesday, November 10th the team departs for Poland, where on Wednesday it will come up against Prokom Sopot.
Obradovic shared out congratulations
Zeljko Obradovic congratulated his players for more than one reasons in the press conference of the encounter amongst Panathinaikos and Aris in Thessaloniki: “We expected a tough game, especially after our trip to Madrid and yet another hard encounter that we had there against Real Madrid. Today we did not make the mistakes we committed there and this is a point I would like to insist on and congratulate my players because they showed personality, character, team spirit and determination and congratulation to Aris too. It was a great game”. Panathinaikos’s head coach also referred to the greens’ tactics: “We try our best to read the game, to exploit anything the game itself might present us with. Players of the greatest caliber exist on the Panathinaikos roster, that have the ability to read into situations and react accordingly. There were moments when we wanted the ball to go low, moments when we sought for game at the low-post seeing that we presumed we had an edge close to the bucket. The good thing for us is that we had motivation and concentration in a difficult away-court, across from a great team such as Aris”.
Fotis Katsikaris focused on the last point that Obradovic remarked: “Whichever team in Europe, not only us, must commit a perfect game to be able to consume Panathinaikos. It is important to cut into its pace, as it has Pekovic in its synthesis, a player able to break open any defense. In the second half, what we paid for was the backcourt players’ game. That is why Panathinaikos is a good team. Because it can read the game blindfolded! We might have contained them at 70 points, driven them to turnovers, however we missed many shots that cost us dearly.
We must remedy a few issues, start off from spirits and work our way up from there. The shots we attempted were not committed under bad conditions; they simply did not go in. Our image has changed since the clash versus PAOK. If it was the same we would be better off to pick up and leave; and I would like to thank the fans for their support this evening. This is not lip service, it was really important for us to have them by our side after last week’s result”.
