It wasn’t a bad shot and in this completely unpredictable game it would have been fitting if Louis Olinde‘s three-pointer from the corner had landed in the basket at the very last second. But he clapped against the ring, and Alba Berlin never had a happy ending. Alba Berlin lost 75:76 (23:22, 15:22, 21:17, 16:15) against the giants Ludwigsburg in the basketball Bundesliga in front of 1,600 spectators in the arena at Ostbahnhof on Sunday. It was the third defeat in the third game after the two-week break in Berlin. “We played well at times, but not for more than 40 minutes. In the end it depends on a litter that was completely free and I have to put it in,” said Olinde disappointed. “In training I hit it nine times out of ten.”
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At Alba, after the eleven infections and the subsequent quarantine, the squad was finally complete again. The last two players, Johannes Thiemann and Jonas Mattisseck, returned, but Marcus Eriksson and Malte Delow got a break. The Berliners got off to a good start and quickly took a 6-0 lead. John Patrick didn’t like his team’s initial phase at all and so Ludwigsburg’s coach called his first time-out after just 1:48 minutes. The guests then pressed aggressively and made life very difficult for Alba. The Berliners had great problems playing out open throws.
The fact that Alba has neither the liveliness nor the rhythm of good days after the break and the two defeats in the Euroleague during the week quickly became clear after the decent initial phase. The Berliners made too many mistakes under the Ludwigsburg pressure, had to take some bad shots and scored just five points in five and a half minutes at the beginning of the second quarter. Ludwigsburg repeatedly used Alba’s ball losses for quick counterattacks. In this way, the guests developed a lead that grew to ten points in the meantime. Alba at least limited the damage with threes from Maodo Lo and the former Ludwigsburg player Jaleen Smith – six points behind at half-time was rather good news from a Berlin perspective.
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After the break it looked like Alba had found some energy somewhere in the dressing room. Ben Lammers and Luke Sikma cut quickly, and then it was again the US center who worked the ball into the basket following a Maodo Lo miss. Within a minute and a half, the Berliners had leveled the game again. However, this crazy game continued to go back and forth. Ludwigsburg continued to make the fresher impression and only a few minutes later had the chance to pull away to ten points again thanks to two free throws from Jonas Wohlfahrt-Bottermann. But the former Alba pro missed both attempts from the line and in return Alba’s Yovel Zoosman completed a fast break.
Sometimes it’s moments like this that turn a game around, and the Berliners seemed to draw additional strength from it. A three-pointer from Oscar da Silva even put them in the lead again and they didn’t let the following 10-0 run demoralize them. Things came to a head in the last minute: Lo scored, but dribbled into his own knee on the next attack. Ludwigsburg’s top scorer Tremmell Darden (22 points) had the last word – because Olinde’s possible game winner clapped on the ring.
