Zeljko Obradovic made reference not only to his satisfaction for his team’s victory in the encounter versus PAOK but also to the fiesta that followed the conquering of the team’s sixth Euroleague F4 and moreover to the Panathinaikos BC president’s appearance in the arena after a very long absence, Mr. Pavlos Yannakopoulos.
“I will start off with all our people organized for us. It was nice and I believe it was so because it was simple. And I am very happy for that. After I would like to thank our fans for the great atmosphere they created and due to this atmosphere my players performed a very pleasing game this evening. On Saturday I await an entirely different encounter and it is only natural that PAOK will try to compete much better coming off such a result in this game. It is only 1-0 and we know that the road towards the final means that someone must get to more wins than this. One thing that pleases me a lot is that after quite some time I saw Mr. Pavlos Yannakopoulos, after all the health issues he had to face. A I happy he was able to be here and enjoy it with us”.
Romain Sato stated: “We knew PAOK is a good team. We wanted to go out on court and play aggressively. Nothing will be easy. And we headed to battle to perform with all our might”.
PAOK Head Coach, Soulis Markopoulos pointed out that: “First of all congratulations to Panathinaikos for the European trophy and its victory today. When you commit 24 turnovers across from Panathinaikos you cannot be competitive. Today we were unworthy of our expectations. We hope not to have such absences it the following games such as we had today so as not to be facing such great problems. I told the guys at half-time that they are competing in a team with great history and that they brought to team so far. We are uneven sizes. Panathinaikos won in Barcelona and brought the European trophy here. When your mentality brings you down and the team has young and inexperienced boys it is easy to receive such defeats. We hope that Marshal who is faced with an issue with his wife will be with us in the next game”.
Dimitris Kalabakas noted: “It was a tough game for us. We knew Panathinakos’s superlative and found ourselves on a bad day hence such a point gap. We proceed… We have the next game ahead of us. We will try to get all that we are entitled to. In every game we fight for the best possible outcome. We know Panathinaikos has a more complete roster than us but we will try for the best”.
