Jasikevicius’ Barça could not miss the final four in Kaunas, the hometown of the Lithuanian coach. Destiny was so written that the Blaugrana team sealed the classification yesterday precisely in Kaunas, beating Zalgiris on the fast track and avoiding unnecessary suffering. It will be the third consecutive presence of Barça players among the four best in Europe, all under the Saras umbrella, and the 17th in total for Barça.
The Blaugrana team could not have chosen a better stage to sign such a beautiful feat. The Zalgirio Arena was dyed as always in a spectacular green, which perhaps anticipated what can happen in this same pavilion two weeks from now in the final four, and drew an unparalleled atmosphere that seemed not only to make Barça nervous but also Zalgiris himself. The staging of the two contenders was not worthy of a Euroleague playoff, in which the Lithuanians had more pressure, forced to raise a double match-ball.
The succession of mistakes and the making of one bad decision after another by both of them was tremendous. The match looked like something out of a horror movie. Barça lost one ball after another, and accumulated up to eight in the first quarter alone, with surreal actions such as Jokubaitis’s throwing the ball at his foot, and it was too difficult for him to look at the basket. In fact, he barely made eight field goals in those nightmarish opening ten minutes. Zalgiris didn’t fare much better, for which the hoop appeared to be the diameter of a strawberry yogurt.
With a local idol on the visiting bench, Barça was accumulating points with enormous difficulty, only supported by Vesely’s wrist, but the Lithuanian’s inactivity served him well in the 3-13 that brought up a triple from Jokubaitis, another ex of Zalgiris.
The irruption of Dimsa changed the duel and, under his command, the green team signed a partial 12-2 that balanced the forces. Even then, Barça’s attacks were an absolute disaster. Vesely had lost his finesse, Laprovittola went into halftime with just one shot at the basket, of course missed, and some desperate turnovers, and Mirotic didn’t score his first points until the 18th minute thanks to a good triple A basket that cut short the reaction of Zalgiris, who had threatened until 24-19 with two points from Birutis, too comfortable. The 26-29 with which the first half concluded perfectly explained what had happened on the floor, with two teams too nervous and without any kind of success.
The passage through the changing rooms did not finish suturing the wound in the offensive rebound that continued to damage Barça, but it did fix the problems in the fluency of play of the Blaugrana. Jasikevicius’s men moved much better and with a copy of three-pointers they opened a hole in the scoreboard. The 32 points they scored in the third act were barely answered by Zalgiris. Satoransky was the one who started the operations but Tobey was the one who perfected them with three consecutive 3-pointers to make it 45-61 just before the last quarter. A three-pointer on the horn by Lekavicius propelled a 10-0 run for the Lithuanians that pretended to give Barça some headaches, but Vesely’s wrist was back in place and some good minutes from Jokubaitis quelled the reaction and they pointed the way back to Kaunas.
