Klaipėda’s “Neptūnas” lost at home 83:96 (20:25, 14:26, 18:19, 31:26) to “Juventus”.
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“Neptūnas” is trailing 0-1 in the semifinal series, which is played to 3 wins. The first team to achieve three victories will advance to the grand final, while the loser will go to the small final.
The team from Utena took the home court advantage – the second game of the series will take place on Friday in Utena.
“You saw the emotions and energy yourselves. It’s hard to say right after the game where we were in the first half. Whether it was confusion or something else. A very poor first half. We gave them too big a lead. Shooting did not help either. I tend to look more at defense, we need to get back on defense faster,” said G. Petrauskas after the game.
In the second half, “Neptūnas” stopped the bleeding and won the fourth quarter by 5 points. However, it was not enough.
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“When we started to guess on defense, we started to press too much and they began hitting three-pointers. A real Pandora’s box opened. We get scored on under the basket, we get fast breaks. All the defenses we tried did not work. We have to accept the defeat and draw conclusions within 48 hours,” emphasized the “Neptūnas” coach.
In this game, the Klaipėda team shot from long range with only 22.7% accuracy (5 out of 22). This was also painful for G. Petrauskas to watch.
“The shots were taken by people who usually make them. This is part of the game, you have to be able to play without them. Today we failed to adapt to the flow of the game. We need to find additional weapons. I don’t want to talk too much about offense. We have to adapt to defense. If we don’t hit, we can’t allow fast breaks,” said the coach.
The next game will take place on May 29. What will be most important?
“We accept this as a painful defeat. We played in front of wonderful fans and did not take advantage of them. We did not let them get fired up because we ourselves were passive. This is a big problem. We have to recover psychologically and prepare for the next game tomorrow,” looked ahead G. Petrauskas.
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