BADALONA (Spain) - The second Semi-Final of Season X of the Basketball Champions League, powered by Ameresco SUNEL, Final Four, paired the back-to-back champions Unicaja with an AEK team out for revenge after falling to the same foe in the Semi-Final last year.
Dragan Sakota's men were able to secure that revenge on the night, thanks to a convincing defensive performance that stifled a struggling Unicaja team en route to a 78-65 win.
The Queen won three out of four quarters and led for 37 of the 40 minutes in the game. They dominated every statistical category and won this game with energy to spare for the Final.
In truth, the biggest factor in the game was Unicaja's shooting woes; they shot just 36 percent overall and an anemic 25 percent from deep, but that isn't to say there weren't some intriguing tactical duels afoot.
Join us as we go through the tale of the tape to explore them.
Dragan had a plan
"Ibon tiene un plan" is the famous phrase and song sung by the Unicaja faithful. It translates to Ibon has a plan (obviously!) and refers to coach Ibon Navarro's master plan to build a squad that won seven trophies in five years.
Indeed, it was a plan that inspired Dragan Sakota to build his own squad in the way that he has. And on this occasion, it was the AEK coach who had the winning game plan for his illustrious opponent.
So often we find ourselves talking about defensive schemes designed to break the rhythm of an opponent's offense, but rarely do we talk about the opposite.
What you can see in the clip above is exactly that: from the opening tip, AEK had Keyshawn Feazell set a Ghost screen, followed by immediately slipping early out of the next ball screen. The idea was clearly to disrupt the timing of Unicaja's defensive system of aggressively hedging on pick-and-rolls.
If the defense can't be sure how much contact or how long a screener will stay in the action, there is always going to be that moment of indecision and second-guessing when they try to time their coverage.
For AEK, this was a very fruitful ploy.
On the defensive end, AEK were also into their bag of tricks early. Watch the arrows on the screen below and count the number of switches on defense.
The outcome was a Unicaja possession that lacked the usual purpose and Greg Brown made his first momentum-shifting intervention of the night, with a crowd-pleasing effort to get out a block and jump shot in the corner.
Unicaja didn't help themselves with their own shooting performance either.
"Disappointed with the result. In the first half, we just couldn’t make shots. I thought we got great looks, I thought we played solid basketball, but we just couldn't make shots," said Killian Tillie after the game.
Another huge factor was AEK's ability to slow down the famous Unicaja running game. AEK knew that Unicaja thrive on getting their bigs rim running to set the tempo, but they managed to negate that by refusing to send bodies to attack the offensive glass.
Unless the shot was from the corner, we were regularly seeing only one AEK player trying to clean the glass, with everyone else opting to get back early to slow the transition game.
"I think we were ready for the game. We had two weeks of really good practices. We know they like to run the fast break. I feel the key was our defense and ability to take that away," Lukas Lekavicius explained post-game.
The game was never over until it was over
For all of Unicaja's woes, and all the apparent comfort AEK enjoyed in their control of the game, the deficit never ballooned out of control, and the threat of a double champion never fades when they are still within arms reach.
Whilst they were able to make more shots in the second half, as always with Unicaja, it was actually their defense that kept them in the game.
Early in the third, Kendrick Perry and Emir Sulejmanovic sparked a run with a trademark trap on the ball screen that was quickly converted into two points on the other end. Plays like this were exactly the reason AEK had planned to use Ghost screens and slips early in the game.
A possession or two later, and Unicaja were continuing to build their platform to get back into the game from increased levels of fight and physicality on the defensive end.
The first arrow you saw on the screen in that video above is what we call a Push-and-Under coverage for transition ball screens. Sulejmanovic effectively pushed Feazell into the screen and took away his ability to roll to the basket, whilst simultaneously allowing Perry space to get under the screen comfortably.
The second arrow you saw on the screen pointed out Tyler Kalinoski in a Top Lock position, denying Frank Bartley's ability to use the off-ball screen. After denying the first screen, he fought under the next one and then did a fantastic job of contesting a forced miss from AEK's main offensive weapon.
Unicaja were able to stay within 10 and 12-point gaps for most of the second half thanks to defensive effort like that. On another night, maybe the shots fall at the right time, and at a higher percentage and the game would have been very different.
The crowd were the sixth man
When you have a crowd like AEK do, willing and pushing you to win the game, the extra energy that can provide feels like having an extra player on the court at times.
Especially when you know how to engage them. Greg Brown and James Nunnally were the two in this game that were able to find the perfect timing to flick the switch to set the crowd on fire.
In the pre-game preview, we surmised that Greg Brown could be the X-Factor in this game, for this exact reason. And thus it came to pass.
The first dunk that you see in the video below will be enshrined in BCL folklore forever, but it was more than a dunk. As were the two subsequent dunks, and in fact every play he made in that video above.
They all seemed to come exactly when Unicaja were starting to sniff a way back into the game. The impact those plays had on the crowd and his own teammates was colossal.
Frank Bartley was his usual self, top-scoring with 16 points, also at choice moments in the game, but it also has to be said that James Nunnally's steely determination and understanding of the moments in the game when his team needed him were absolutely crucial.
More than tactical, Nunnally had the aura about him of a man who had no intention of ever leaving the game with anything but the win. The crowd clearly felt that from him as well. This was a man enjoying his work.
So, there you have it, AEK moved on to a matchup against Rytas Vilnius in the Final. Lukas Lekavicius and Mindaugus Kuzminskas will face up against the first Lithuanian team to ever reach this stage of the BCL.
At this point, we find ourselves in the curious position where both squads have the feel like destiny is on their side. Of course, only one of them really does, but we will need to wait until Saturday, May 9, at 20:00 CET to find out.