CSKA — Dinamo Sassari, 27 November 2015

The meeting of CSKA and Dynamo was worthy of the team names despite huge geografic and tournament distance. Our team had to work hard to win.

CSKA vs. Dinamo Sassari: 93-87 (+6)

CSKA: De Colo (17 + 3 rb), Teodosic (21 + 4 pf), Fridzon (7), Nichols (9), Korobkov (6 + 4 pf), Kravtsov (1), Vorontsevich (5 + 8 rb), Higgins (11 + 4 as + 3 to), Kurbanov (10 + 7 rb), Hines (6 + 5 rb + 2 bs)…

Dinamo Sassari: Haynes (14 + 4 pf), Petway (8 + 3 rb + 5 pf), Logan (21 + 3 to), Formenti (3 + 3 rb), Devecchi (2), Sacchetti (6 + 3 rb), Stipcevic (4 + 3 rb), Eyenga (19 + 7 rb + 3 to), Varnado (10 + 6 rb + 3 bs + 4 pf)…

Dimitris Itoudis, CSKA head coach:

Nothing is easy in our life, you have to work hard to win. When we prepared for the game, we asked the team not to let the opponents receive anything easy. Still we had a sloppy start, first of all defensively, and let the opponents a lot of easy things. As I warned before the game, Dinamo played with different level of intensity, they had 7 team rebounds taking lose balls, they had 18 offensive rebounds overall, the set the tempo on defense, pressured us. In the third quarter we took over and went up by 12, but Logan and Haynes played great and allowed their team to tie it in the end. We will study why we let it happen. But in the clutch we created good spacing, we made right decisions and got key plays from Teodosic, De Colo, Kurbanov, Hines made 2 huge blocks. The game will be a good lesson for us.