The coach of Panathinaikos Superfoods Athens, Argyris Pedoulakis said after the game against Zalgiris Kaunas: “We were nervous with this being our first game. The key was that in the last 10 minutes, when we changed up the game, team slowly woke up and we started playing well. As you know, we are a brand new team this season, and we are missing our main player Mike James. I felt like with Nikos Pappas playing, he woke up the team a little bit. Generally, we had a lot of opportunities, we missed some, we won some, but overall we did well.”
From his side, the coach of Zalgiris, Sarunas Jasikevicius noted: "I consider this game a game of lost opportunity. We had a pretty clear game plan coming in, and some things we risked we wanted to risk, and some things we never wanted to risk, we risked and got punished for it. A lot of mental mistakes on our part helped them escape a little bit. Crucial was the basket-and-one from Gist, and immediately an offensive rebound from the foul shot. We managed to come back from that, but two triples from Pappas were also very important. Offensive rebounds are always a consequence how much you drive the ball, because their bigs have to come over and help, which opens room to grab an offensive rebound. We missed a lot of shots. Too many open shots to win in OAKA. Guys were fighting, I am not worried about the effort and work players put in, but we have to play a little smarter and make shots in gyms like OAKA."
