Mindozas6
Moderator
Fair enough. I watched 1995 EC final a year ago and the D was so ridiculously loose. That walking zone all the time. Off course, Sabonis couldn't and didn't want to step up, but that was more like pseudo D than real. I'm not familiar with pre-NT Garastas, but one can learn little from Garastas from current perspective, IMO. He may have been great in 80s, but in the NT there were little tactics and with better organised D we could really take gold in 1995. Sasha was shooting one open jimmy after another and there was zero adjustments.
The problem was that we had no tools for adjustments. Of course some coaching mistakes could've happened, I watched the game long time ago to remember all the details, but IMO most vital thing was fatigue. Don't forget that this was 3rd game in 3 days for our limited and a bit aged roster, all main guys played almost 40mins each in knock-out stage and bench was very short back then. Another issue was that our key defender of that generation - Chomicius was already aged and pretty much done. He was beast at defence and could cover lot of holes till 1992 more or less, but 1995 he was not able to bring that anymore. Anyway, if we coped well defensively with Yugos in group stage, then in final it looked like there are not much gas left in our tank for both offense and defense. As you wrote - Sabas was slow, Kurtinaitis was slow as hell and fouled out if I recall correctly, Marciulionis gave it all in offense, Lukminas never was a good defender, youngsters were too raw to help. Yugoslavia simply was younger, fresher, with a bit longer bench with more experienced players there. If we could match them in 1st half, then in 2nd it was harder and harder to do that and they finally broke us. Actually they were simply a bit better than us back then. It hurt to lose a lot, but now it looks like a bit better team won