Champions nights are back for Bertram: tomorrow the home debut in BCL against Chemnitz. The words of assistant coach Squarcina
New European emotions are now upon us for the Bertram Derthona. The challenge with the Germans of Niners Chemnitz, scheduled future, Wednesday 2 October, at 20:30 al PalaEnergica Paolo Ferraris of Casale Monferrato, opens the second season in the Basketball Champions League of the black and white club and the first day of the Group G, which also includes the Spanish team BAXI Manresa and the Portuguese team Benfica, who will face each other tomorrow night in Spain. The group stage formula is the same as last year, with 6 matches to be played for each team with a home/away formula, with the first-placed team qualifying directly for the second-placed group stage, the second and third-placed teams forced into a Play-In (best of three matches) to also access Round 16, and the fourth-placed team immediately eliminated.
In the challenge with Chemnitz, absolute debutant in the BCL and who started the Bundesliga with two defeats against Bayern Munich and Ulm after the nice third place in the regular season and the semi-final-playoff of last season, the team coached by Walter De Raffaele It comes in the wake of the 80-68 home win over Vanoli Cremona three days ago, which got the Lions off to a good start in the Serie A championship, featuring – among other winning factors – a record-breaking Ismael Kamagate.
CURIOSITY' Bertram has won all three of its home games in the BCL group stage. Coach De Raffaele has coached 55 games in the competition, ahead of only nine coaches, while Tommaso Baldasso was the only Juventus player to never drop below 9 points scored in the eight games played by Derthona between the group stage and the Play-In in 2023/24. The Germans' head coach is Rodrigo Pastore, an Argentine who also holds Italian citizenship and a former player with a long history in Italy with the jerseys of Jesi, Ragusa, Trieste and Osimo.
STATEMENTS “Chemnitz is a big, athletic team, and above all they want to make you play badly, they want to bring you – thanks to their intensity, to many defensive changes, to the physicality they put in – to a dirty basketball, different from the one you are used to”, says the assistant coach Iacopo Squarcina. “It will be important to be patient in seeking advantages, without the frenzy of having to take a quick shot but having the calm to move the ball, share it and know that for 40 minutes there could be a game of gusts, to which we must respond with clarity and team play”. The Turin coach's analysis also goes more generally into the group: "We will face an extremely difficult group, which hides many pitfalls. Both Manresa and Chemnitz both play at high intensity, they are teams that interpret modern basketball made of high rhythm and athleticism, they take big risks due to both the great pressure on the ball and a lot of running around the court, therefore an unpredictable basketball that we will have to be good at, as already said, to face with patience and lucidity. While Benfica, which in my opinion qualified after an extremely tough qualifying round by winning in the final against a team that plays well like Freiburg, is an opponent that is not as easy to face as it would seem on paper, because they have experience, among others they also have Beto Gomes who had done very well in Trento, an American who was seen in Italy like Marcus Thornton, plus a solid base of players that makes them complicated to face. Then as usual the European commitment is very conditioning for the teams, especially at the beginning of the season after the aftermath of the preseason. So the impact will be important, we should be good at dealing with it as a team".
