The head coach of Panathinaikos OPAP, Rick Pitino stated after the end of the game against Zalgiris Kaunas:
"First, I want to give Zalgiris great credit for the game that they played. Once again, we got behind and I don't think I have ever seen a team that I coached let another team shoot 77% from two-pointers and 50% from three-pointers. The amazing thing is that we were only down 3. Amazing! If we came off a road loss, I gave them 11 goals, 5 offensive and 6 defensive goals, that if we are going to achieve any percent of these goals, we were going to win the game. One, we want 20+ assists. We had 22. We got it the other night, we got 80%. We want more than 12 offensive rebounds, we got 12. We want 40 paint touches, which is a key to our basketball team, we didn't get it tonight. We want to be under 10 turnovers and had 14.
We want 20+ fast breaks and we got 11. And the correlation is this, if you let a team hit 77% and 67%, there is no missed shots to fast break. Defensively, we wanted 35 deflections, the other night we got 34, which was good. We had 29 tonight. We wanted 10+ steals – these are lofty goals – and we had 6. We wanted 5 blocked shots and we got a donut (0). We wanted them to shoot under 32% from the three-point line, which is a lofty goal, and they shot 50%. We wanted them under 30 paint touches, going north and south, and they got 41. And we want to keep them defensively, under 12-second shots, even when 10 is the number we want, and they have 5, but that is misleading, because when you shoot that higher percentage, there is not going to be any offensive rebounds.
I think that Tyrese Rice gave us two great games. They have a great press, almost like a college press, the 1-2-1-1 then they trap. The big key is to stay away from the corner and we actually had to take a timeout to change our press offense so we could get the ball in the middle, force the switch and make Tyrese beat them off the bounce. Their press was that good that we actually had to change our press offense. That was a learning experience for the guys. We didn't get our goals but I am ecstatic with two EuroLeague wins, coming from behind with great courage. But I also give tremendous kudos to Zalgiris for the way they played."
