ImageAnother busy Euroleague week with twelve matches. Six of those were won by eighteen points or more. Rytas had a huge win in Orléans that has them now on top of their group at 2:0, while a big Final Four cadidate tumbled in Andalusia, and another European giant lost at home.


CSKA’s fall:
Another frightening performance by CSKA, this time at home to Virtus Roma. It was less the quality of the guests’ play and more CSKA’s complete lack thereof that left us behind stunned after this game. Even without Matjaz Smodis and Trajan Langdon, you would expect last year’s Euroleague finalist to do better. But reality is that JR Holden is playing exactly like he had been doing before Ettore Messina arrived – shot-happy, forgetting how to direct the offense – , that Ramunas Siskauskas is somehow either hiding in a more free lance system that needs a star player to demand the ball, and/or he is overseen by coaches and teammates, that Anton Ponkrashov is not the player to have the ball in his hands with the clock ticking down [then why is he repeatedly put into this situation?], that Victor Khryapa, despite displaying a solid package on the offensive end and usually being a very good defender, was repeatedly blown by for easy layups by Hervé Touré, and – most importantly – that the team is neither showing the defensive intensity, nor the offensive discipline that made them so tough to beat in the Messina days. In this kind of state, CSKA could easily face elimination in the Top16 group phase.

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