BADALONA (Spain) - The Final of Season X of the Basketball Champions League, powered by Ameresco SUNEL, Final Four paired AEK BC with Rytas Vilnius and served the world watching with possibly the greatest game ever in the Final of a European club competition.
Rytas Vilnius came back from 20 points down to send the game to overtime and eventually win 92-86. They were still down by 18 at the end of the third quarter, but somehow scored 47 points in the final 15 minutes of the game, against the best defensive team in the competition.
We're still not sure how they did it, and we probably never will fully understand - isn't that then the true magic of basketball, though? - but join us as we go through the film and attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible.
AEK wanted to send a message
AEK controlled the majority of the first quarter, ending the stanza with a 25-15 lead. In fact, they dominated the entire first half and looked to be in total control.
MVP of the Season Frank Bartley was having his way from behind the arc, making shots off the dribble, and scored 10 points in the first quarter alone. James Nunnally came off the bench to score 11 first-half points, and Lukas Lekavicius was causing his countrymen problems on both ends.
A Zalgiris guy, too, getting a few louder boos from the Rytas faithful, an hearing his name being shouted equally as loud by AEK's fans.
From the first possession of the game, it was clear that AEK wanted to send a message to their opponents that they were going to make this game about matchups, and they were going to win those matchups.
In the first quarter alone, RaiQuan Gray, Frank Bartley, and James Nunnally all went to the low post and forced their will on their opponents.
The third clip you see in that video below (31-second mark) shows Bartley matched up against Jerrick Harding and drawing a foul. The chirping back and forth after that play told everyone in the arena what AEK's intentions were.
It wasn't just on the offensive end that AEK were sending a message.
On the defensive end, they were making it clear that they were prepared to send multiple bodies at Harding to stop him from impacting the game.
They had their own defensive rules just for Harding, and as you see in the clip below, it worked to perfection, as Harding went scoreless in the first half.
The first arrow on the screen showed you Bartley, leaving his man to over-help off the wing to shrink the floor and stop Harding seeing any space to turn the corner.
The second arrow shows you Vasilis Charalampopoulos also leaving his man to be the third player contesting or pressuring Harding's shot.
Whilst it's fair to say that Harding also missed open shots in the first half, AEK's rules for him and their size in all positions to shrink the floor clearly had an impact on Rytas' star man.
Timeouts matter
Whilst nobody could look you in the eye and tell you they saw the Rytas comeback coming, there were always the faintest signs that they hadn't given up looking for adjustments to turn the game back their way.
One of those signs was the way that head coach Giedrius Zibenas used his timeouts and end-of-quarter breaks to get his team good looks.
Even from his first timeout of the game in the first quarter, he was designing plays for his team to attack closeouts because he'd noticed AEK were overhelping as a result of their plan to shrink the floor.
If you listen to the audio from his timeout, you can hear him tell his team:
"Pass, pass, closeout attack, take shots. We need some better shots as well."
Before you watch the clip below, we want you to take a mental note of the first closeout and the final shot both being in the corner.
That was far from the only time that Zibenas was able to inject confidence into his team from a break in play.
In the second quarter, after Nunnally had put AEK up 34-19 and stoked the AEK crowd by pulling out his shirt to show the AEK letters to the camera, Zibenas called another timeout to send his team on a 4-0 run.
Of course, that wasn't the most impactful timeout of the game, though. We will come to that one that you probably clicked on this article to read about shortly.
Before that, we have to talk about Speed. To be more specific, Speedy's speed.
For all of Rytas and Zibenas' efforts, they just couldn't find a foothold in the game for three quarters. The Queen were up 55-35 at the midpoint of the third quarter, things were looking bleak, and almost nobody could see a way back into the game.
We say almost nobody could fathom a way back into the game, because clearly Zibenas and Speedy Smith had an idea.
"First of all, this win was dedicated to him (Speedy Smith), because with Jerusalem he was in the Final a few years ago, so, I know he was waiting for this Final, and then, during the game, I just kept telling him that we need to pace up the game. Five on five, this academic basketball is not good for us. We wanted to put some extra tempo, and Speedy trusted the idea," explained Zibenas exclusively to the BCL website.
Smith became the first player with 10+ points, 5+ rebounds and 5+ assists in a BCL Final, finishing with 11, 8, and 9, respectively.
That drive to push the tempo started to rub off on his teammates as well, and in the end of third quarter break, Zibenas clearly managed to get his point across.
From the opening possession of the fourth quarter, Rytas were a new team. Watch the clip below, you can see now it's Rytas shrinking the floor and playing Drop defense on the Lukas Lekavicius pick-and-roll.
The goal was to defend the action 2v2, contest the Lekavicius shot, get a stop, and run.
And just like that, the Rytas crowd were sensing the impossible.
Harding had woken up and started finding ways to force his way to the bucket, scoring 15 points in the fourth quarter alone. The Rytas coaching staff, again, deserves some credit for that. They started using guard to guard Ghost screens to attack AEK's fourth-quarter switching scheme. And Simonas Lukosius? Simonas Lukosius was in another world altogether.
We're not talking about the young Lithuanian being simply In The Zone. This man had accessed the spiritual plane, floating above the court, watching himself drain shot after shot.
He hit five of five from deep in the second half, and not only that, he didn't even hit the rim on a single shot - only net, and the arc on each shot never looked like missing.
In fact, the only shot he made in the game that touched the rim was a layup in the first half!
Then we come to the most telling timeout of the season. Before we show you the play that Zibenas drew up in the timeout with 19 seconds on the clock to send the game to OT, let's hear from Lukosius himself on what he was thinking before the play.
"I mean, not much was going through my mind; it was a play that we actually ran in shootaround, and I was put in the position to be the shooter, and we executed it perfectly. I just had to do a shot fake and one dribble, and yeah, I'm really glad it went in," he explained.
The humility in that explanation is the perfect showcase for everything this Rytas team is about. As is the mentality to draw it for Lukosius.
Harding is the star of the team, and he had been cooking in the fourth, but there was never a question for Zibenas or Harding about ego; Lukosius was the right man to take the shot.
The play actually looked like it was drawn for Ignas Sargiunas to use a screen and come to receive the inbounds, but that was all deception, as first Sargiunas screened Lukosius' man, then Lukosius used another late flare screen to get open on the weak side for the shot.
Extra credit also needs to go to Zibenas again for the lineup changes he was making late in the fourth quarter and to start the OT.
He had gone with a small lineup late in the fourth, surrounding Gudaitis with combinations of Smith, Harding, Sargiunas, Lukosius, Paliukenas, and Bruhnke.
Then, when Sakota matched up with that in the OT, Rytas were able to find matchups for Arturas Gudaitis in the post.
The Rytas big man punished AEK with 5 unanswered points to really seal the momentum in OT and make it clear that Rytas were going to win this game.
There is always something you don't expect
For all of the analysis, for all of the scouting, for all of the pontification, basketball will always humble us by finding something that nobody expected.
Simonas Lukosius did exactly that in this Final - 23 points on 66.7 percent shooting, six made threes in the final 15 minutes of the game.
This was truly one of the all-time greatest performances in the history of European club competitions, and almost nobody had heard of him before this season.
This is a player who had passed through both the Arvydas Sabonis and Sarunas Marciulionis Basketball Schools in Lithuania.
He had been in the Telekom Baskets Bonn project, he had been in the NCAA with Butler and then Cincinnati, but to say he was unheralded to start this season would be an understatement in itself.
We will just leave you with his highlights to enjoy, but remember when we told you about that shot from the Zibenas timeout in the first quarter and to take note of the corners?
Well, take note again of the way that Rytas were able to find him in the corners again and again in the fourth quarter.
AEK overhelping from the corners is clearly something Rytas' coaching staff had picked up on.