Monaco overthrow Milan and open main route to Euroleague play-offs
Monaco basketball players managed to overthrow Olimpia Milan in their Mediolanum Forum hall, to win 72-63 and take an almost decisive step towards the Euroleague play-offs thanks to their 14th victory of the regular season .
Thanks to five minutes of madness in the third quarter, Monaco overthrew Olimpia Milan in the Lombard Mediolanum Forum and opened a main route to the Euroleague play-offs, a goal posted at the start of the season. The Roca Team won 72 to 63, with another big performance from Mike James (19 points and 7 assists), a 14th success this season in the Euroleague which could well be enough to see the play-offs and see the C1 again next season.
To become the first club in the French championship since Villeurbanne in 2000 to reach the quarter-finals of the Euroleague, several possibilities are available to Monaco. This will be the case on Friday, in the event of a setback for Alba Berlin on the floor of Efes Istanbul. Without depending on the results of its rivals -Alba Berlin, Red Star of Belgrade and Bayern Munich–, Monaco has its destiny completely in its hands.
A victory in the last regular season meeting against Berlin in eight days in its Gaston-Médecin hall and the ticket for the quarterfinals, synonymous with presence in the Euroleague next season, will be validated. The dynamic is very clearly on the side of the Roca Team (13 wins in the last 16 matches), which has become completely unplayable since the arrival on the bench of Sasa Obradovic in mid-December, replacing Zvezdan Mitrovic.
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To seek success in the last seven Euroleague games, Monaco had to draw on its resources on Thursday, because the meeting got off to a very bad start when in the middle of the third quarter no basket was returned. Led 42 to 31 in the 25th minute, the players of the Principality then failed in the space of five minutes a severe 20 to 1 in Milan, with a Monegasque revolt from Paris Lee.
When we play like that, of course there aren’t many people who can stop us.
Yakuba Ouattara
For his return to the Milan hall, he who played at the Olympia during the 2018/19 season, Mike James was targeted by the Italian public, copiously whistled throughout the match, but went beyond to offer a new great performance, and taking in its wake Donta Hall (16 pts). “We keep the same energy, in the second half we played well and we managed to grab the victory“, a comment on the 31-year-old American rear after the meeting. “We knocked down Milan“, who had lost only three times in his room since the start of the Euroleague season, commented Yakuba Ouattara at the microphone of the L’Equipe channel after the meeting. “I don’t have too many words, but we did it. We don’t give up, we stayed focused and it’s above all the defensive energy that puts us back in the gameadded Ouattara. “When we play like that, of course there aren’t many people who can stop us. But we are unpredictable. What is good is that we respond present in the big meetings“, he concluded.