The turnovers committed by his players and Olympiakos’ “fair” victory, as he characterized it, were two of the main things that Zeljko Obradovic referred to during the press conference after the end of the third final.
“Congratulations to Olympiakos for its fair victory”, underlined Panathinaikos’ coach, only to go on saying: “We started the game off very badly and with the exception of the third quarter we continued to play poorly.One of the elements that can show how far more aggressive Olympiakos was is the fact that in the first quarter they took 13 offensive rebounds and we took 9 defensive ones. They grabbed more rebounds under our own basket. If you add to that fact our 12 turnovers and the zero steals we had in the first quarter you can understand that our defensive game was very bad. Congratulations to Olympiakos for its fair victory.”
Kostas Tsartsaris added: “We came to break the home advantage, but did not do anything from what the coaches had told us to. We were too indulgent, found ourselves trailing behind in the score early on, and kept chasing after them. At some point you run out of stamina. We must examine what we did wrong in order to win on Wednesday and come to claim our chances here.”
Olympiakos’ coach, Dusan Ivkovic, noted: “We wanted to set the game to a higher tempo and managed just that. We had absolute control over the rebounds and committed few turnovers. At the beginning of the third quarter we committed some turnovers, lost the rebounds and against a good team such as Panathinaikos you cannot afford to do that. I believe that we are rather a little closer to winning the championship. The main factor in winning was the fact that we are a younger team, a team that wanted to and was actually able to play at a faster pace. We controlled the game and got great help from Law. In the first games we were playing with Mantzaris and Katsivelis. It was hard to coach a team with such young guys. Panathinaikos has players such as Diamantidis and Jasikevicius, who have accumulated experience, but thankfully we made it happen for us.”
Finally, A.C. Law said: “We knew that this was going to be a difficult game. We knew that Panathinaikos had come to control the pace. We knew that whoever won this game would get a step closer to the championship title.We got the lead but they managed to make a comeback; however, at the end, we clinched the victory. It is going to be tough at the OAKA, but we are going to go there to win.”
