MIES (Switzerland) - This is exactly what we expected from the Basketball Champions League Season X, powered by Ameresco SUNEL.
Whilst watching this game, 40 minutes felt like 40 seconds.
The quality of basketball on display, the competitiveness of the two teams, AEK BC and ALBA BERLIN, and the raucous atmosphere created by the home crowd in the SUNEL Arena provided one of the great spectacle games of the season so far.
At the same time, however, for ALBA BERLIN the 35:02 minutes they led the game for felt like a lifetime.
They even held an 11-point lead late in the third quarter, but all the while, it never felt like a game the Germans had control of. For all their relentless tempo and defensive work-ethic gave them in terms of advantages, it always seemed like a game waiting for AEK to find the solution to the problem.
And sure enough, eventually they did.
Let's jump into some tactics clips from the night and have a look at how they turned the game when it mattered most.
ALBA on top
In his post-game press conference, AEK's star of the show, Frank Bartley, gave testament to how difficult ALBA made it for AEK in the first three and a half quarters of this game
"Credit to ALBA BERLIN, they're a really good team, a really well-coached team. [...] They played really well together, and they got a lot of offensive rebounds in the first half, which hurt us a lot. I think they had 10 plus in the first half, and they average 10 a game. Obviously, we had to clean that up. Coach got into us at halftime. We worked on some things. We worked on switching defense late in the fourth quarter. Guys really bought in and found a way to get stops," Bartley explained.
We start our look at the tape that shows exactly what those offensive rebounds looked like in the first half.
From the moment ALBA turned the ball over, all five players reacted faster than anyone in yellow and black. By the time the ball crossed half-court, it was a 4-on-1 break.
ALBA's #9, Jonas Mattisseck bailed AEK out by electing to take the transition three-ball, but that is the way this team plays.
They want to force the tempo and the chaos at all times, and despite the shot missing, their approach still paid off in this clip. Seven-footer, #17 Norris Agbakoko had beaten all of the AEK bigs down the floor and cleaned up the offensive rebound with ease.
AEK struggled to control the ALBA tempo for most of the game and as a result, often found themselves chasing the game when ALBA were chasing the ball on the glass.
This next clip is another great, visual representation of the structured chaos that ALBA can inflict on teams with their pace and energy.
The play in the clip above started with #15, Martin Hermannsson throwing the entry pass for their Pistol action from the half-court line.
#13, J'wan Roberts gave the handoff then flowed straight into the empty corner, transition ball screen with Hermannsson, but pay attention most to what happens when Roberts caught the ball on the short-roll...
Not one, not two, but three (!) ALBA players start cutting to the basket. With the defense already in rotation to cover Roberts, it was an impossible task to get a body on everyone.
And they didn't, #5, Sam Griesel slid to the rim for the easy dunk. When Bartley described ALBA as a "really well-coached team," this type of execution could easily have been what he was talking about.
AEK switching gears
The second half of the third quarter saw AEK really start to find ways to control the tempo with their own game. First of all, it's harder for your opponent to get out and run when they are taking the ball out of their own basket, and secondly, they seemed to remember that just because ALBA were in a rush, it didn't mean they had to be.
We saw repeated possessions with AEK running deep into the shot clock, forcing a half court tempo and more often than not, those possessions ended with a RaiQuan Gray post-up or a Frank Bartley 1v1 situation.
And if it wasn't either of those two, they were finding Vasilis Charalampopoulos for open threes (more on him at the end).
Then, as Bartley mentioned, Coach Sakota sent them out in the fourth quarter with a switching defense in lineups stacked with the length and athletic advantages to change the course of the game.
Watch AEK's #2 Greg Brown III in the clip above.
Whilst Bartley, Gray, and Charalampopoulos will take the plaudits for their offensive output in this game, he was the most important cog when it came to cleaning up the rebounds and executing the switching defense.
In this possession, he switched onto young starJack Kayil, contested the shot. Pay attention to the upright stance, disruptive hands, and then the switch to contest with his left hand. That was the best example technically that you could ever want to see of a big covering a switch.
And to put the cherry on top, AEK rewarded him with a dunk on the other end to seal a dominant sequence for Mr Brown.
It wasn't just a case of single switches and living with the matchups for AEK either. Watch the clip below and follow the arrows on screen.
First, you saw Bartley and Gray switching the first pick-and-roll, but instead of leaving Bartley to guard Roberts in the paint, Brown communicated the Triple Switch early away from the ball and arrived on time to Wall Up and then block the shot.
As we said, other players will have stolen the limelight, but in that key stretch to take the lead, Brown was the game-changer on the defensive end.
A possession or two after this saw Gray and Bartley smelling blood and diving on the floor to make hustle plays, and Charalampopoulos sealed the deal with two huge offensive rebounds, two steals, and three clutch three-pointers in the final 2:19 minutes.
Make no mistakes, this was a huge win for Sakota's AEK team.
They will be hard to stop from here but we also shouldn't underestimate the impact of their fans behind them in the home court. The return game in Berlin on March 19, is not one you will want to miss.