A week after losing by the minimum in Istanbul against Fenerbahçe, Barcelona suffered its second consecutive defeat in the Euroleague against Monaco this Tuesday (74-90). In the other match with Spanish participation on matchday 19, which marks the halfway point of the regular phase, Valencia defeated Partizan Belgrade (86-73) led by Joan Peñarroya, former Barça coach.
Once the first quarter was over, The Barça team was very successful, however, Monaco, a polished offensive machine embodied in a figure above all others, Mike James, all-time top scorer in the Euroleague and nightmare of the disorganized culé defense.
The matter was unclogged, at least apparently, by Darío Brizuela, accustomed to shaking up his team in the last European afternoons, but Barça soon ran into the wall raised by Vassilis Spanoulis, a legend of continental basketball who is now writing his own path on two benches, the Monegasque one and that of the Greek team, bronze in the last Eurobasket.
Pascual acknowledged in the run-up to the match that in his first stage as Barça coach he was very close to signing the Greek point guard, then Olympiacos star, to form an outside pair with Juan Carlos Navarro, now Barça’s basketball director. Neither one nor the other would have been a bad thing for the Gavá coach to remedy this Tuesday a difference that ended up being insurmountable: a culé defeat, the seventh of the season in the Euroleague, five days before the league classic.
Things went better for the fashionable team in Europe, Valencia Basket, which won a very tight duel at the Roig Arena against Partizán and took advantage of Hapoel Tel Aviv’s setback against Zalgiris to reach the lead in the top continental competition with 13 wins in the 19 games that make up the first round.
The performance of North American Darius Thompson, the highest rated of the team, contributed a lot to this. taronja this Tuesday with 17 points, six assists and three rebounds for a total of 22 points in the same minutes of play.
“I’m happy, but the numbers and the streaks don’t tell me anything,” Pedro Martínez, Valencia coach, warned after the crash. “If we lose the next three games, we will drop to the middle of the table. That is what makes this competition incredible,” he added.
His team, in any case, said goodbye to the year in the best possible way, at the top of the table in the Euroleague, and third in the ACB, where they have not known defeat at home. The Roig Arena has been erected as a fortress for the grapefruitswhich this season have 15 victories and only one defeat as hosts, the one suffered in October behind closed doors against the Israeli Hapoel Tel Aviv.
