It has lasted a year Roger Grimau as Barça basketball coach. Just one year. He had a contract until 2025, but the Barça club has made official what was already known since Madrid closed the season blank with that resounding 3-0 win at the Palau.
The now former Barça coach had no words then. Nor arguments to justify the decrease in the performance of your team, a new short-lived project. So short that Grimau has not been able to sit on the bench for 12 months. First Xavi came out in football and now Grimau in basketball.
Xavi Pascual, the great candidate to succeed him
In its statement, Barça announced that it “has decided to terminate Grimau’s contract”, expressing its “gratitude for the professionalism, commitment and dedication he has shown” at the Barça club. “The Palau Blaugrana will always be your home,” the club tells him in that note in which he announces his dismissal.
At the moment, Barça has not given clues, at least officially, about who will succeed Grimau, although the great candidate is Xavi Pascual, once his time at Zenit in Saint Petersburg closed. But it is not the only avenue in which Joan Carles Navarro, the general manager of the basketball section, is working, interested if Pascual, who gave the Euroleague in 2010 to the Barça club, does not work out. Jaka Lakovic, Gran Canaria coach is also on that list, although it would be necessary to pay 300,000 euros to execute his exit clause.
Grimau’s stage has been short and bad. His signing was announced last summer (June 28, 2023) and his departure has been finalized in June 2024. He came to succeed Saras Jasikevicius on “a bet and radical change”, as Navarro, general manager of the basketball section, defined it last Sunday, remembering that “not everything is the coach’s fault because some players have not been up to par.” But the first one to come out is the coach, who has only won one title this season: the Catalan League. .
The bet and the change, with a significant cut in the budget, have not gone well for Barça, although not everything is Grimau’s responsibility, according to the executive. But this was already the epilogue to such a brief stay at the Palau. “My future? I’m not an idiot, the balance is bad,” said the coach who, in his first experience in the elite, has not managed to impose his methods.
4 titles lost, 3 against Madrid
Barça has been losing value and credibility throughout the season. He lost the chance to win the Super Cup with Madrid (80-90, September). Months later (February 2024) the Cup also escaped them against the same rival (85-96) and amid a climate of tension in the locker room, synthesized in the bad relations with WillY Hernangómez, the star signing of the season after the departure of Mirotic.
The distrust of Grimau’s work It was accentuated when the option of entering the ‘final four’ of the Euroleague slipped away after the defeat in the fifth and final game at the Palau against Olympiacos (59-63, May). And everything closed with Madrid’s 3-0, also on the Barça court (92-95). In other words, it has been the more than evident inability of Grimau’s Barça to compete against Madrid, which has taken away three of the four titles at stake, which has cost him his dismissal.
2024-06-08 10:34:55
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