Panathinaikos got an important victory against Olympiakos (98-90) and now is the favorite team to finish in the top spot of the Greek League. The most significant think is that the team started to play good again. The assistant coach of the team, Dimitris Itoudis, talked to sepk.gr about the players' limit-up!

"It was an important win, because first of all we got a big advantage for the first spot of the regular season and secondly we had a good game against a great opponent like Olympiakos" was his first words.

"We were better in the biggest part of the game: we hit some shots and make the right choices. We were also good on defense, despite the fact we allowed some easy baskets. Olympiakos was on a good day, too, especially in the key, were they tried to get our big guys into foul trouble. Pekovic and Batiste had problems and lost their rhythm.

The "greens" overcome the foul-trouble going small. "With Haislip as "5" we managed to keep our centers in the bench and we found solutions against Olympiakos's zone defense, with which they managed to change the pace of the game.

Although we didn't have a low-post player, as Marcus hasn't adjusted totally, I think that we got it together. We also get some points in transition.

With a small line-up we put problems to Olympiakos, we got more aggressive both in offense and defense".

Dimitris Itoudis also mentioned the differences with the Cup game. "It was two entirely different games. The cup final wasn't such a quality game. Another fact is the "good day" that Teodosic had. In the cup he made some crucial shots, while he only had 1/7 three-pointers in this game. Pekovic also had limited playing-time and Olympiakos played without Kleiza and Bouroussis.

The biggest difference was the fact that we played at home. There are more things that we prefer to talk with out players behind closed doors".

The "transformation" of Panathinaikos requires hard work from players and coaches in tactics and spirit. "We had to work on our moral, we had to change our "chip" after the losses we had and kept us out of two goals. The important think is that we can interfere with the players' way of thinking, analyzing through the games what went wrong. They saw a lot of plays. We talked, we analyzed and we worked hard on the court.

It is important at this point that despite only a few would by our stocks, we managed to have a limit-up. We did that in the locker room, behind shut doors. We talked and we found solutions. And that was proved us we played with confidence, high-percentage shots and a lot of activeness".

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