Valencia Basket achieved a valuable victory against Real Madrid (89-76), one of its closest enemies and a rival that it ousted from the playoffs in the Euroleague. Pedro Martínez’s team triumphed this time thanks to its defense, with a very serious work by its players against two lights of the white team: Facu Campazzo and Edy Tavares.
Valencia Basket and Real Madrid faced each other with two different styles. Pedro Martínez’s team advances in games in spurts, often driven by success in three-point shooting (41% against 25% of the whites at the end of the first half), and Sergio Scariolo’s team offers a more classic aspect, with a balance between external and internal play, where it shows its muscles with Edy Tavares, the giant who always deploys his propellers in the area to generate a safe radius around his basket, and the newcomer Alex Len, a boy with a lot of work after spending half his life in the NBA. Although the main headache for the orange team was the powerful forward Trey Lyles.
The taronja team took the lead in the transition from the first to the second quarter with a good defense born from the energy that Pedro Martínez puts into his quintet by spinning the roulette wheel non-stop on the bench. Maximum effort in a few minutes and then rest. Here’s what it looks like in their style book. His good deed was completed at the end of the second quarter by Reuvers, colossal throughout the game, who unleashed an alley-oop in the face of Edy Tavares and also earned him his third foul. Darius Thompson raised the stakes with one of those burning triples (45-38).
There are not many centers in Europe that can boast of overcoming the Cape Verdean giant and Reuvers did it with a definitive performance at the end of the match. On the outside, Darius Thompson and Omari Moore, the elegant, wingers with silky basket shots, also imposed their game while teammates like Puerto or Pradilla did the dirty work.
The match became tense at times and there was even a hint of a fight, but Valencia Basket did not lose concentration and continued to torment Campazzo so that he does not become, for another day in the Euroleague, the microwave that accelerates Real Madrid’s comebacks when they seem most lost. The Juventus team knelt at the Roig Arena, where 15,000 fans celebrated a victory that always has a special flavour.
Baskonia, for its part, suffered another painful defeat (114-89) in the Euroleague. The setback against Hapoel Tel Aviv, one of the strongest teams in the competition, prevents them from continuing to climb up the table after their recent good results.
