21.08.2012

Israel Get Off The Mark In Iceland

Israel turned on the style to get their first win of the EuroBasket qualifying round at the third attempt as they topped Iceland 110-83.

After two frustrating close losses, Israel made no mistake with big first and third quarters powering them to victory.

When Omri Casspi hit a three-pointer with 3:22 left in the first quarter they were already 25-8 up.

Threes from Jon Stefansson and Haukur Palsson helped Iceland get it back to 10 points, 29-19 at the end of the first quarter but Israel continued to edge clear and led 39-25 on Lior Eliyahu's lay-up midway through the second.

A 12-2 Israel run early in the third quarter then put the game beyond reach for Iceland with Yogev Ohayon's three making it 69-45 with 4:29 left in the period.

Casspi and Raviv Limonad had 17 points each, while Alex Tyus had 16, Yotam Halperin 13 and Ohayon 11.

Palsson had 19 points for Iceland, with Stefansson adding 17, Hlynur Baeringsson 15 and Jakob Siguardarson 14.

21.08.2012

Quotes Iceland vs. Israel

Haukur Palsson, Iceland:

"We didn't communicate on defense like we should, nobody did, that was our biggest problem. That made our rotations tougher and our defense was therefore not like we planned. Our offense was good even though we missed some easy shots early in the game. In the end the defense is what brought us down. We really need to put this game behind us and get ready for the Montenegro game. We are going to get a win against one of the big teams, that's for sure."

Peter Öqvist, Iceland head-coach:

"I think in general our communication in defense was lacking. Israel has a very mobile offense with multiple screens and we lacked the communication and defensive focus to get a hold of them. 83 points against Israel is good when you consider they scored 110. Our thing is to get the stops and defensive rebounds and then take off in transition, that's where we get our easiest baskets. But when they score in the numbers that they do which means that we score 83 points without getting many transition baskets, that's a pretty good offensive result. I think this team has improved in the previous two games and I think today was one step back defensively and what we are going to do in our next game is look at our own performance, especially defensively and we are going to make sure we do it a little bit better than what we did today and better than we did against Slovakia as well."

Omri Casspi, Israel:

"Iceland didn't surprise me, it was more about us. We lost the first two games in the tournament and we didn't play good basketball. We had to win this game and we had a lot of pressure on us the last couple of days after we lost to Estonia at home and we had to step up our game and that's what we did today. Our strategy was to be aggressive, get stops and we did a pretty good job for the most parts. We played good defense for 35 minutes and the last five minutes we kind of let them off the hook. Other than that I think we played good defense, we shared the ball on offense and we played together as we are supposed to do."

Arik Shivek, Israel head-coach:

"We were under pressure, I'm not going to hide it, because what happened to us against Estonia, it was an accident which shouldn't happen to us, but it happened. Even against Montenegro, we were very close to winning that game. We came here with a lot of enthusiasm as you could see that from the off and we knew that there was only one result that we were going to take away from this gym. I'm very happy we played the way we played as a team."