The fifh game got us the first (competitive) defeat of the season. However, the game against Bosnia
(82173) was surprisingly even, and a huge contrast against our last game two seasons ago.
Bosnians went into the game with higher enthusiasm and home court advantage, not to menton much higher quality of their squad. In addition, our wrong all-in double (or triple) prediction should have put the final nail in our coffin. But it seems that trying to avoid being read, their base offense was (to say at least) suboptimal tactics, which almost cost them a win. It is probably a bit quick to say, that we would have won without the double prediction, but we would definitely be even closer.
The statistics of the game show that we were inferior with FG%, and also strongly inferior with rebounding, especially the latter probably mostly due to their HCA and higher ent. We won quite many shooting fouls, which kept us in the somewhat close proximity, although their win was never really threatened.
After our initial lead (highest 16-10), the score turned before the end of Q1, and had risen to their 10+ advantage by the half-time (highest 56-41, by the end of Q2 56-45). Third quarter saw their lead rise even further, to 20+ (highest 78-56), but we were surprisingly resilient to their attacks, and started to close the gap in the last quarter. We got to 98-104 with two minutes to the end, but then ran out of energy for the final minute or so.
In any case, a good demonstration of our improvement in the past two seasons, and a positive surprise for sure. It was a game, which I marked as surely lost, but now I am even a bit dissapointed I went so aggresively into the predictions. Maybe with their RnG tactics they would still be more convincing, even with our GDP, so our only hope would be to let them make a mistake (leave predictions empty and hope that they play something suboptimal). But random in BB is also very strong, so making strong conclusions from one single game is not a very wise thing to do.
In any case, now we await the home game against Argentina, where a win can already get us a playoff spot. We are now 19th in the tournament table, which means we can still hope for a top 16 position, but it looks like we are gonna need to win all three remaining games. 7-1 score could theoretically also lead to a top 8 position, but our points difference seems to increase too slowly, and in our upcoming games there seems to be none where we might hope for a significant boost in PD. All speculations aside, we go from game to game and try to acheve the most possible in every single Monday.
Hoping for a good GS
