So now you all know why I brought European basketball to Brighton. Wow, what a night we had against the Lithuanians last night.
What a game, what an atmosphere, what a performance by our guys. The only disappointment is to look at our home page today and see us 0-3 in the ULEB Cup. We don't deserve that record.
I know we lost by a point to Split but this time we were playing a team that's 50 times better. You've got to understand where these guys are. They've got one player making more than our whole team put together. That's a fact.
That's another notch up. They were a hardened, veteran big-time basketball team compared to Split, who will be there in about eight years. The way we played was great.
I think people here are waking up and seeing what it's like at the top of the European game and I'm thrilled about that. It's great we can bring a team like Lietuvos Rytas who have such passionate fans.
Credit to Lithuanian basketball in general because they've got a passion for the game. I think the Lithuanian fans got our fans jump-started and our fans got our players jump-started and it was a hell of a night.
Defeat to Lietuvos Rytas was no disgrace and hopefully will not take away any of the momentum we seemed to be building with our great win at Sheffield last Saturday.
We looked out of it at 16 points down but I was delighted to see us keep battling and get the result.
Kendrick Warren, of course, was awesome for us in that game. I give him a lot of credit. I got on his case a little bit the day after we got back from our game with Ionikos in Greece.
I told him he was the best player on the court but he only played one half. I told him he needed to get in shape, play well for more minutes, score more buckets in the second half and tell people to stop him.
I told him: "Teams need to double, triple team you or whatever and you're still going to score." He was sure ready to go at Sheffield on Saturday night, he really wanted to win and he was huge for us.
Sullivan Phillips also responded well in the fourth quarter and that was pleasing. I went to Sully kind out of out of desperation to be honest with you because I thought Randy Duck was making a lot of poor decisions, even though he was doing some other nice things.
I didn't think he was leading the team the way he is capable of and I decided we needed an energy line-up.
Sully was awesome. He was on the glass, he was all over. I think what I'm going to do now is use him a little better. I may get him off the point guard spot a little bit. We've used him at the point, he has done some nice things but he's struggling right now because we're playing more of a half-court game and that isn't him.
We are really building something and we hope to move on against Thames Valley on Sunday. We owe them one, that's for sure, and we look forward to putting some of our European lessons to good use against the Tigers.
GO BEARS!
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