UTSUNOMIYA, Japan – Bay Area Dragons coach Brian Goorjian rued the lack of competitive games they played in the lead-up to the EASL Champions Week, one of the main reasons why his team blew an 18-point lead to bow to the Seoul SK Knights on Thursday.
Goorjian on Bay Area Dragons' EASL bid
Goorjian said the Dragons’ last official match was Game Seven of the PBA Governors’ Cup finals against Barangay Ginebra, and have only played in tune-up games against college teams which didn’t have their marquee players.
“The negative for us right now is that we are the only team in this competition that isn’t involved in any competition right now. The last six, seven weeks, we haven’t been playing games like the other teams where when the pressure came on, we struggled because we haven’t been in those kinds of situations for a long time,” said Goorjian.
After their PBA Commissioner’s Cup finals, the Dragons stayed in the Philippines for their build-up for the EASL, but Goorjian admitted it didn’t have the quality that they would have wanted.
“We really appreciate what the college teams do but we won those games by 50, 60 points and most of those games were bench players. It didn’t simulate tonight. Again, we are not making excuses but one of the issues against that, game competition, these teams are coming from that, played from that, tried to duplicate that in practice but we couldn’t simulate that in the game,” said Goorjian.
“At the end of the day, in the last eight minutes, they (Knights) were much better than we were,” said Goorjian.
The Dragons face Utsunomiya Brex on Friday in hopes of making it to the finals despite the defeat against the Knights.
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