Brindisi, Piero Bucchi is full of regrets: "Need coolness"

Brindisi falls in Pistoia, where the hosts prevail with the result of 79-71 only thanks to a fiery finale. Precisely for this reason, coach Piero Bucchi’s end-of-game analysis is marked by great regret. “I think we had put the game back on its feet. We even got as high as +1, but at that point they proved to be colder than we were,” he admitted.

There is no lack of deep regret for a great result for Brindisi that faded only because of small but decisive details. “We were good at building good shots, in this sense very good Saccaggi,” Bucchi stressed.

But when a groove was dug, we struggled in the recovery. Really a pity, because we had managed to take the game that far despite our difficulties today. Which we also cannot understand as excuses. We just should have had more coolness to score the decisive baskets, from this point of view we were lacking.”

Bucchi also dedicated a reflection to the refereeing, although he does not consider this aspect an alibi for Brindisi’s knockout either. “After the technical to Pistoia’s bench, something changed,” he noted.

At that point the game became more edgy, but we were still three minutes from the end. Brindisi played its game, they were playing at home and it’s okay that they came back down. We missed the baskets in the final, that’s the point.”

The defeat in Pistoia comes at a delicate moment for Valtur Brindisi, which in recent weeks had already cashed in a home loss against Fortitudo Bologna. A period of downturn that risks weighing on the standings in view of the playoffs, where the biancazzurri aim to gain direct access to the quarters by avoiding the play-in.

On the market front, the Apulian club has meanwhile moved important pawns to present itself at its best for the final phase of the season. In the hours leading up to the Pistoia game, the arrival of Khalil Ahmad, an American guard who had already starred in A2 with Pesaro, where he had traveled over 20 points on average, had been made official. Ahmad, just back from a spell in Israel with Rishon LeZion that ended with the consensual termination of his contract, takes the place of Zach Copeland, who will not leave Italy, however: the 1997-class guard is destined for Sella Cento.

For Brindisi there now remains one last regular season game to be played, on Sunday, April 26, at PalaPentassuglia against Ruvo. An appointment that the biancazzurri cannot afford to underestimate, with the hope of closing in the best possible way a regular season that, despite a few missteps in the final, has seen them for a long time among the protagonists of the A2 Series championship.