A nightmare shooting night, 17 for 55 from the field, doomed any Olimpia chance in Game 1 of the EuroLeague playoffs. Efes won convincingly 64-48. It was a weird game, Olimpia establish its tempo and made it a defensive battle. In fact, Efes was kept 19 points under its average. But the offensive futility prevented Olimpia from posing a serious threat to the defending European champions. Olimpia had some good spurts, in the first quarter, when it built a six-point lead and finished up by five. Then after seven scoreless minutes in the second quarter, when the defense was so good that despite it Efes had just a six-point lead, Ben Bentil made three straight corner threes and Olimpia was able to take a lead momentarily. But the second half was terrible offensively. In the fourth quarter, Coach Messina tried a small ball line-up with Shavon Shields at the 4 and Nicolò Melli at the 5. It didn’t work well enough to attempt a comeback. “They played a game with a lot of personality, their defense was overwhelming and didn’t let us create any advantage. On top of that, when we had some open shots we missed them. And on top of that Nick Melli had a calf injury at the end and didn’t look very promising,” Coach Ettore Messina said.

Efes now is leading the best-of-five series 1-0 with Game scheduled to be played on Thursday in Milano. “We need to find a way to create advantages at the offensive end of the floor. It starts with little things, a better pass, a screen better set, a change of speed, coming off a screen to shoot and not to just catch the ball,” Messina added. “We made some mistakes defensively – he continued – but they looked magnified because we were really struggling offensively and every field goal allowed was painful. In reality, we had a good defensive game.”