Lakers News: Italian Coach Bemoans Facing Austin Reaves' Team USA In Quarterfinals
After seeing his program get ousted from the 2023 FIBA World Cup in embarrassing fashion, an utterly lopsided 100-63 defeat on Tuesday, Team Italy head coach Gianmarco Pozzecco kvetched loudly about the club that eliminated his own: a young, star-studded Team USA, which includes Los Angeles Lakers starting two-guard Austin Reaves as a key reserve.
Pozzecco pulled no punches in his assessment of his unlucky draw, according to Brian Windhorst of ESPN.
The US only fell into the same bracket as Team Italy in the FIBA quarterfinal round because it lost to Team Lithuania over the weekend in an upset. Lithuania has since been eliminated by Luka Doncic's Team Slovenia.
“My players didn’t deserve it to play against America because we were first in our group,” Pozzecco argued. “You need to be a little bit lucky. I think we did everything we could do in our group… We deserve maybe a little bit better, we deserve to overcome quarterfinals.”
As Windhorst notes, even if Team Lithuania had initially lost to Team USA over the weekend, and thus had been Team Italy's opponents on Tuesday, Italy would still have been an underdog.
Reaves scored 12 points off the bench for the Americans.
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