Ancient like no other, the old Palau is also as robust as anyone else, capable of withstanding the most intense earthquakes. Also the one that was lived this Monday in a hectic day in the noble zone of Barça basketball, where what is already, without a doubt, a full-fledged change of cycle was finished. The confirmed goodbye of Mirotic, the team’s franchise player, has been joined by surprise by Sarunas Jasikevicius, who has not reached an agreement to renew his contract and will be replaced by Roger Grimau on the bench.
This concatenation of decisions forces us to take a step back in order to be valued with due distance.
Barça and Jasikevicius had been negotiating the renewal of the Lithuanian for months. Throughout the season the positions were distanced to the point that for a time there was not even a dialogue. But in the last stretch of the competition, in which Jasikevicius was able to recover the team from limbo after the painful European KO and lead it to the League title, everything had straightened out. The club wanted him to continue and the coach had agreed to a salary reduction to try to fit into the strict budget reduction policy imposed by Joan Laporta in all spheres of the club. But the demands of Barça and the effort of the Lithuanian never came to the fore and in a club weighed down by a war economy everything precipitated in just a few hours.
With Jasikevicius’ goodbye, a stage that was called to be one of the most glorious in the section comes to an end thanks to a deck full of stars but that has been left halfway. The Lithuanian leaves with two Leagues and two King’s Cups as the most outstanding titles, and also with three appearances in the Euroleague final four. But he has not been able to find the key to take the final step and recover European glory by offering the long-awaited third continental scepter to the club, which has continued to resist him since 2010.
And perhaps the choice of Barça can also be understood along these lines, which is accompanied by enormous symbolism. Roger Grimau, 44, will sit on the bench for the next two courses. Grimau was until now the coach of the subsidiary (Barça Atlètic) and the junior. He is a house bet, with the financial savings that this entails. But he is also a nod to the past since as Barça captain he was in charge of raising the second Euroleague for the club more than thirteen years ago, on May 9, 2010, at the Omnisports de Bercy, in Paris. An increasingly distant and melancholic stamp in the culé environment. Curiously, his coach at the time, Xavi Pascual, had been one of those who had sounded the loudest as a possible replacement for Jasikevicius in recent months.
Grimau is now waiting for some of the most intense weeks. First, finishing defining his work team, in which everything indicates that Víctor Sada will be there, his assistant in the subsidiary and the most trusted person of the new coach. And then, exhaustively monitoring the preparation of the squad that he will have under his orders, a task in which Juan Carlos Navarro, sports director, has been immersed for months. Grimau has the advantage that almost all the youngsters who have made their debut in recent seasons with the first team have been under his command. Apart from Nnaji, who has already played regularly this season, names such as those on loan Caicedo or Marcos re-enter the orbit of the Palau with all of the law.