A superb Olympiakos performance ensured a win in the SEF Stadium, beating the Vazelos 84-72 and making the finals series 2-1 in the finals of the A1 championship. Now our reds will face the Lagoi one final time in the Olympic Stadium on Wednesday and will need to break their stronghold to win the finals.

Olympiakos started with the usual five - Mantzaris, Spanoulis, Keselj, Antic and Dorsey and soon racked up a decent home advantage. Keselj started off the scoring and the Serbian was red-hot at the start of the game and quickly notched up a five point lead. Spanoulis made it 7-0 before Keselj increased the score further (9-3). As the period went on Antic made it 14-6 before the Vazelos made five points of their own. Printezis and Dorsey worked hard in the first period and took the score from 22-11 to 27-15, to 29-18 at the end of the quarter.
The second quarter saw Hynes and Printezis increase the lead to 14 then onto 17 points in our favour (41-24). The Vazelos were completely silenced by this point and apart from Baptiste seemed to have given up. We maintained the lead at 17 or 18 points throughout the remainder of the half (jumping as high as 20 points on one occasion) and led 53-35 at the break.

The same classic five lineup started off the second half of the game but we started to lose some easy baskets and made mistakes in our play. Our defence started to look rather ugly and our lead slipped from 18 points to 12 points. Baptiste was again the playmaker for the Lagoi and it was annoying that we could not mark him effectively during this period.
However in the final quarter we went up to a twenty point lead again then to 23 points (78-55). Perhaps with the feeling that the game had been already won, we let our performance slip and the result was the Poutanas Gios making a comeback. We relaxed a little too much and let the collossal advantage that we had slide away. We ended the game 12 points in front, still a good scoreline but not as good as it should have been.

1st Quarter : Olympiakos 29-18 Poutanas Gios
2nd Quarter : Olympiakos 53-35 Poutanas Gios
3rd Quarter : Olympiakos 69-51 Poutanas Gios
4th Quarter : Olympiakos 84-72 Poutanas Gios

Olympiakos (Ivkovic): Hynes 6, Lo 9, Antic 7, Spanoulis 15, Dorsey 2, Keselj 10, Gecevicius 6, Printezis 16, Papanikolaou 6, Mantzaris 5, Sloukas 2.