Milan wins a bad race-7 of a gripping final series, capitalizing on a staggering performance from their opponents.
– Game 7. In American professional sports they are said to be the two most beautiful words there is. It’s difficult to blame him, but often these matches, precisely because of their character of definitive sentence, are ugly, not to say ugly. This game 7 does not leave the seed, especially due to a Virtus Bologna who arrived at the final appointment with the inertia in favor after the sparkling game 6 and with less pressure than their opponents, who had to protect the home advantage. The Bolognese, on the other hand, enter the parquet with a quarter of a delay, in both halves: the partial of 21-9 on balance is the key to the match. Coach Scariolo finds nothing from a ruthless Belinelli up to now and Teodosic’s first half is well below the sufficiency, but above all he assists to the debacle of his longs department: Jaithe and Mickey combine for just 11 points and 5 rebounds in 2. In general they never manage to guarantee offensive options other than 3-point shots or raids by an excellent Shengelia. Melli’s second premature foul seemed to be able to put the game on the Juventus track, but the bad game of the 2 aforementioned big men meant that this was not the case;
– Milan finds a legendary Datome, who with a 6/7 in the first quarter allows his team to attempt their first (later decisive) escape. The cut just above his left eye dramatizes his face, as if his thick beard and haunted gaze weren’t enough. Gigi, 36 springs, is the foothold on which the Messina team relies in absentia from Melli. It can’t be a coincidence that it’s the other top Italian from Olimpia who stands up as an emotional and technical leader. In a match of this type, human and character qualities certainly count more than technical and physical ones: this is how Voigtmann’s soft test can be explained, while Ricci too managed to go beyond its limits. His triple in the middle of the fourth period was fundamental, when Virtus was a shaky boxer who needed the classic push to go down definitively;
– The third quarter will remain in the memory as 10 minutes of terrible basketball horror. It was like those NBA2K game clips when you and your snack buddy loaned your cousin and his fourth grade buddy joysticks and watched the havoc. The partial will say 10 to 5 Milan and the impression was that the first of the two that came out of the quagmire would have closed (in the case of Milan) or reopened (Virtus side) the dispute. On the one hand, however, Virtus was stubborn with the 3-point shot, never trying to get close to the rim through the P&R and the circulation: the imprecision of Belinelli, Hackett and Teodosic, however, frustrated any comeback attempt. When the ball never, ever enters, everything becomes more difficult: confidence collapses, easy things become impossible and even defensive effectiveness suffers. Luckily for Bologna, however, Milan abounded in turnovers, fouls in attack and in shooting (or no shooting) choices that could only be explained by the pressure of a game 7, at the end of an exhausting season for both. The ability of Scariolo and Messina, not the first two found on the street, to shake up their players and get them out of the bubble in which they were thrown is surprising in the negative;
– Scariolo’s tactical attempt is the extended 3-2 area, which then turns into 2-3 with the first overturn to the side. Milan chooses to attach it with the Voigtmann totem to the bezel to sort the balls. When the latter leaves, Melli assumes the role of added point guard and Olimpia severely limits turnovers: this doesn’t translate into points, given the poor shooting percentages, but at least it doesn’t unleash the Juventus counter-attack. Virtus is then pulled further into trench warfarea slow-motion marathon from which Milan, with a margin permanently over double digits, takes advantage of with a rhythm marked by the hands. When Teodosic finally removes the cap from the basket, it’s too late, because on the other side Billy Baron goes wild and sews the shield on his team’s chest.;
– As mentioned, for Milan and Virtus this was the last match of an eternal season: 70 matches for Milan, 72 for Virtus. We often joke about the hypertrophic rosters of our two Euroleague representatives, but we don’t dwell on the fact that their season contains almost double the matches of an average Serie A team. This third comparison between the two highlights their dominance in Italy, which is based on budgets that are currently unattainable for the other contenders. Bologna’s future hangs on the possibility or not of participating on a permanent basis in the Euroleague, with all the economic advantages and player attraction that this entails, while on the Milan side this factor is not in question. These last 3 years of Italian basketball have been based on this rivalry and the two teams have shown that they can be competitive even in an increasingly level European context. However, it is clear that for the future of Italian basketball it is necessary for other teams to rise to levels of excellence, to strengthen a public interest which, data in hand, unfortunately was not very significant.