Corona knockout for the Hamburg Towers. Following the EuroCup trip to Belgrade, Hamburg’s basketball players had the first positive PCR tests on Friday. Another one came on Saturday.
Only two hours before the first jump ball in Gießen was it clear that the Bundesliga game would rise. From Towers point of view it should have turned out better! The towers went down with nine men in the basement child (previously eight bankruptcies in a row) 73:100 (35:45).
“Unfortunately we couldn’t prepare for the game because we haven’t had a team training session since our last game on Tuesday,” said coach Pedro Calles.
Lukas Meisner, Seth Hinrichs and Ray McCallum were absent. In addition, supervisor Carina Oesting and boss Marvin Willoughby were not with the team as usual.
Due to staff shortages, Jaylon Brown made a surprise comeback after a hip injury. The Ami even had to borrow McCallum’s jersey! “I wasn’t actually supposed to play,” Brown said. “I hadn’t trained with the team for three weeks and I didn’t know how ready I was.”
It is indicative of the poor performance of colleagues that Brown was the top scorer with 24 points!
But he didn’t want to use the Corona chaos as an excuse for the weakest performance of the season either: “It’s a unique situation that we’re in right now. But that shouldn’t be an excuse.”
The next PCR test is due on Monday. If there are no other cases, Badalona will come on Wednesday in the EuroCup (7.30 p.m., Magenta Sport).
