As I debated earlier, we played our last game of the EC against Armenia. The game turned out to be much easier than anticipated - we finally formed our ranks and got proficient GS all across the roster, while Armenians had some problems. We also didn't hold back and went all in for the last match, while Armenia kept some of their enthusiasm for friendly matches, and went "only" normal into the game. So the end result, 112-75
(77769) meant we achieved by far the highest win in this tournament, which got us to a 5th place finish in the group.
The game itself was quite uneventful. We steadily increased our lead by approx. 10 points per quarter. We had some problems guarding Armenian star player,
Rupen Bohchalyan, who scored 26 points with a FG 10-14. Other players were much less effective, although our defensive tactics (outside box and one) should in theory focus more on preventing good shots from their best scorer. Among our players, we had a very homogeneous distribution of point scoring,
Egghall, Forsbratt and
Lundell scored 14 points,
Sören Häggin scored 13 points, while
Håkansson, Gilltorp and
Nilsson contributed 12 points each.
The defeat of Danes against Estonia meant we got ahead of them in the rankings. Ukrainians were also not very convincing against Azerbeijan, so we could also hope to get ahead of them - at least for the first three quarters. Unfortunately for us, Ukraine stepped up in the last quarter and increased their lead by +19, while we stepped down and only managed to increase our lead by +4.
At the end, this got us where we belonged at the start of the tournament - 5th place in the group and nowhere near the fight for the second round, which was reserved for
Lithiania and
Italy. However, especially Italy was under a lot of pressure, their matches against Estonia and Ukraine were very, very close. This emphasizes the fact, that the differences for one individual match are not that high, which was evident also in our games against the two group favorites. However, what smaller teams lack is consistency, and across the span of five difficult games even very small differences in quality become very evident.
At the end, I can call this tournament uninspiring. Not completely unsuccessful, but I believe we were able to achieve more. This was the final, now really final, season of the NT legend
Tommy Fyhrhult, who finished his NT career with 161 appearances (#1 in the all time list), 2783 points (#1) and 522 assists (#6). Another retiree is
Frank Jonasson, who got to impressive 134 appearances. He was never the first choice in the PF/C positions, and was always just a backup. But, given our small talent pool among high players, he was frequently used, which brought him to such high number of NT games. Kudos to him as well.
Getting some new PF/C players is also our first priority for the seasons to come.
Petter Börjesson also has only one good season left, while
Håkan Dallius is the next oldest regular player in the NT. This means we are really, really thin with high players, but if everything goes perfect, that we might survive this without noticeable decline in performance. But we really need to do everything completely right. A more steady influx of high players is expected when current U23 year olds mature, which will take some time.