With intermittent brilliance and mechanical forcefulness, Real Madrid yesterday won one of the clearest league titles in the history of basketball.
UCAM from Murcia was a worthy last rival, competing as only the best are allowed: rush through all your options, even when reason tells you that you don’t have any.
But the whites were in no mood to further thicken an already very dense season, and intended to close it with the brilliance consistent with an immaculate final stretch.
Rudy Fernández, Sergio Llull and Sergio Rodríguez celebrate Real Madrid’s Endesa League title.
EFE
Because after the defeat in the Euroleague final, Real Madrid has navigated the national league without any defeat in the playoffs. He even crossed paths with Barça, a team that has offered contradictory testimonies, of which we could say that it is in low times because its measuring stick is the greatest rival. It doesn’t matter that you shine, if you give up in front of him.
However, Real Madrid sweated ink over the new change in strategy Site Alonso, from zonal to individual defenses and from long attacks to playing quickly. Encouraged by his parish, he once again mastered for many minutes what must be mastered in sports: the tempo of the game.
Not even in this way was he able to defeat the white steamroller, because the fight was unequal.
Today, pound for pound, the distance between the two is unbridgeable, no matter how much the courage of the players and the approach of their coach tried to equalize the forces. And by one way or another, Chus Mateo always found a solution; yesterday with Tavares, Muse and Hezonja; the previous day with the great Rudy Fernandez.
So, as far as Campazzo took command of the operations, the Madridistas went from dominated to dominators in the blink of an eye.
Real Madrid thus closes a superb exercise of national dominance (since it adds this title to the Cup and Super Cup) not only because of hoarding, but because of unappealable superiority. So much so that in many phases it has offered that false sense of extreme superiority, of accelerating at will to defeat anyone.
It was not easy to win undefeated after having lost the Euroleague final. Just two days later he crossed paths with Barcelona, and perhaps Madrid’s greatest merit lies in this physical and emotional recovery. A major reset, from zero to one hundred after a huge disappointment.
Chus Mateo and its players had broken all records in the regular phase of the Euroleague and eliminated their rival 3-0 in the quarterfinals. But he lost Gabriel Deckthe Argentine gladiator, the man forged for hand-to-hand matches, capable of defending a small or a large, versatile to offer numerous tactical variants.
Without him, Real Madrid lost drive and flexibility, which it would have needed to close an honorable season. Thus, he only remains outstanding, with the added merit of managing a squad with players who are in the final stretch of their career and some pending renewal. But it is already known that in this club the negotiations have their rhythm, that, given what we have seen, they dominate like no one else..
We’ll see what the future holds, without the most complete player in the history of Spanish basketball, Rudy Fernández, perhaps without the magician Sergio Rodriguez.
What we do know, what is history today, is the achievement of the 37th league. And that Real Madrid has been a compact, firm squad all season, with variants inaccessible to the rest because none of them had the raw material that Campazzo, Tavares, PoirierLlull and company.
