Aleksander Sekulic: "Our biggest problem was too many unforced turnovers"
Zenit head coach Aleksander Sekulic commented on the 77:104 loss to UNICS in the 2nd round of the VTB United League regular season.
— I think we prepared the game well in terms of knowing what the opponents want to do, how to attack us, what they want to do on defense. But our biggest problem today was too many unnecessary, unforced turnovers. From those turnovers, I don't have the data, but they scored a lot of points from that. Because of this I believe we started losing confidence. It just got worse. We had some good momentum in the third quarter, but unfortunately Trent got injured. The main thing I really didn't like, and this is something that I hate when the team does, is that we give up. We gave up in the fourth quarter. And when you give up, especially in front of your fans, I mean, they came to cheer for you, I always say, okay, you lose, but the way you lose is very important. I really dislike how we lost today, especially how we played in the second half.
— Probably, turnovers are not the only reason for today’s poor performance. Besides that, the team struggled with good ball movement, and of course, we couldn’t counter UNICS’s shots. What can you do when literally every opposing player is making shots? How to stop that?
— A big part of this is turnovers because when you turn over the ball like we did tonight, you lose confidence in yourself and your teammates lose confidence between themselves, and you let your opponents score easy points, because I think out of turnovers they scored a lot of points. First half I think we limited this turnovers then we had them. I mean there were too many of them but second half was even worse. Okay ball movement could be better for sure but a lot of things starts with this and when you lose confidence you also lose confidence on defense. They had some tough shots today, they were more physical, we were not physical enough. There is 63 percent for two and from field goal 58 — it's too much.
