Nate Reuvers and Matt Costello combined for 35 points as the guests turned the game around in the fourth quarter
Valencia’s bigs thrived from deep in road win at Olympiacos
Game Report
3 Mins read
Regular Season
Round 16 of 38
Regular Season
Olympiacos PiraeusOLY
9299
Valencia BasketVBC
Overview
l
l
l
w
l
w
w
w
w
w
Valencia Basket has done it again. Less than a month after edging past Crvena Zvezda Meridianbet Belgrade, the EuroLeague's hottest team at the time, and less than two weeks after outscoring Panathinaikos AKTOR Athens on the road, Tuesday night saw the Spanish side pull off another impressive win on Greek soil.
Pedro Martinez’s side downed Olympiacos Piraeus 92-99 by shooting the lights out on Tuesday night at the Peace and Friendship Stadium. In fact, Valencia nailed half of its 32 three-point attempts, including 6 made threes to turn the game around in the last quarter.
Olympiacos tried to beat Valencia at its own game, turning the first half into a back-and-forth affair, with the visitors securing a 47-49 lead at halftime. The hosts tightened up their defense and opened the second half with a 12-0 run thanks to 9 points from Thomas Walkup, who nailed back-to-back triples before completing a three-point play. Nikola Milutinov scored inside to give his team a 73-60 lead with 1:21 remaining in the third quarter.
What came next left the home crowd in disbelief as Valencia fired on all cylinders from beyond the arc, netting as many as 39 points in just over 11 minutes to grab the victory.
Leading the charge were not Valencia’s explosive guards, but its two bigs: Nate Reuvers and Matt Costello, who combined for 35 points in the game.
The former nailed 3 triples to end the game on a career-high 21 points in less than 19 minutes. Meanwhile, the latter drained 4 from deep to bag 14 points just a few days after netting 15 against Anadolu Efes Istanbul.
More importantly, they managed to stretch the floor, causing havoc to Olympiacos’s defense.
“We made 29 assists and only 13 turnovers, but I think the difference was that we shot great on three-pointers, especially our bigs, who opened the defense. Reuvers and Costello played great,” Martinez said in the post-game press conference.
A year after Paris Basketball sent shockwaves through the EuroLeague by going on an extraordinary 10-game winning streak, Valencia has been offering a similar, high-pace style of basketball that has captivated fans across Europe.
The visitors found an extra gear in the closing stages, where Olympiacos collapsed on both ends of the floor, with Martinez explaining the benefits of his own philosophy.
“In basketball, tactics are very important but the most important is the mental situation,” he added. “For me, in the last quarter there are two important things.
“One is that when we struggled to score, Olympiacos changed its mentality and maybe thought that the game was over. That’s not the reality, and at this point we scored all the shots we made because we were going up and they were going down.
“But for me the second reason is that if you look at all our players, the one who plays the most minutes is Darius Thompson, who played 24. We try to make a fast rotation, something usual for us in all the games, and sometimes it permits us to arrive in a better physical condition in the last quarter.”
Very few of Valencia’s made threes came off iso or hero-ball situations in the final seconds of a possession. The guests circulated the ball well, doing a great job of finding the open man. Their 29 assists on the night is a season high, as well as a joint club high and the second highest by any EuroLeague team this term.
“We just stuck with the game plan, we’re a run-and-gun team and once we got our opportunities, we started getting stops and things got a lot easier,” Reuvers told EuroLeague TV. “We just keep playing our style, dictating the pace, shooting threes; everyone is hitting shots, playing together. I love this team, I love the guys.”
And who doesn’t love watching Valencia. Having extended its winning streak to five games, Martinez’s men travel to Israel, where they’ll face an in-form Maccabi Rapyd Tel Aviv side that has won three in a row. But all the Spanish side needs is to play Valencia basketball, execute the plan and they will have nothing to worry about.
