After close win against Estonia, Mulaomerovic sees room for improvement: 'We can be much better' / News - Basketnews.com

The coach of the Croatian national team, although satisfied with the win against Estonia, believes that his team can be much better moving forward in the tournament

Credit: FIBA Credit FIBA

Croatia secured their second win in the tournament after beating Estonia 73-70. It was a really tough game, and Estonia fought back until the last few seconds. Karlo Matkovic played despite currently dealing with an injury and he was the top scorer for his team with 17 points and 4 rebounds, in addition to a perfect shooting night (8/8 2PT, 1/1 FT).

Croatia / Schedule

Croatia Greece85-89 Great Britain Croatia65-86 Croatia Estonia73-70 Italy CroatiaTue19:00 Croatia UkraineThu12:15

After the game, coach Damir Mulaomerovic showed satisfaction with the win but also highlighted how this team still needs to improve if it wants to achieve important goals in this EuroBasket.

"We can be happy with the win because it was a really tough match. Against teams like Estonia, undersized teams with great shooters, it's always difficult", Mulaomerovic explained. "Defensively we did a good job but offensively we had issues, especially with the low-post game. I also wanna thank Karlo Matkovic, who decided to play even if he was injured and sacrificed himself".

The coach then focused on how his team can improve moving forward, especially on the offensive end where, at times, Croatia hasn't looked completely in sync.

"As I mentioned before, we can definitely be better in the low-post game, we need to do a better job in that department. Today we lost the ball 18 times and most of those turnovers came in the low-post situations, that's just too much", the Croatian national team head coach said.

"But against teams like this, it's difficult. They have great shooters and being undersized, we were forced to go with a smaller lineup and switch on everything", the coach added. "So there's still a lot of things in which we can be better, but we the last two games coming, against Italy and Ukraine, I believe my players will find the right motivation to do even better".

The coach also answered to BasketNews about the conditioning of Dario Saric, who missed the entire season due to a knee injury, and he's slowly finding his groove back after a first difficult game against Spain.

"I think after the first game he was a little bit down but that's normal because he hadn't played in a long time, he was out for almost a year and a half", coach Mulaomerovic told BasketNews.

"It needed the game against Great Britain in which he found again a bit of confidence, and even today I think he played really well, he gave us creation from position four", the coach added. "When Karlo was on the bench, I also thought about using Dario as number 5. With three big guys, we can play in different ways. So I'm pretty much happy with how things are going".

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