Why Pesic cut Teodosic from the Serbian NT and was he wrong? / News - Basketnews.com

With Serbia beginning its EuroBasket 2022 campaign, BasketNews takes a look at whether Svetislav Pesic made a correct decision by cutting Milos Teodosic.

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August 8th was a calm day with little basketball going on. National teams were starting to think about their first friendly games with full rosters when the blockbuster news leaked - Milos Teodosic is cut from the Serbian national team.

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Just like this, out of nowhere, with no explanation whatsoever. Coach Svetislav Pesic waited one week before giving his thoughts to the media on why he cut the legendary point guard 2 weeks after the start of the training camp.

Usually, with players of this caliber in the later stages of their careers, you are either sure that they belong to the 12-man group that will go to the tournament, or you don't invite them at all.

This kind of mutual agreement between a coach and a legend has become a normal routine - something Milos Teodosic fully deserved after giving every summer to the Serbia national team whenever he wasn't injured.

Yet, it wasn't the case with Milos. And the immediate question is - was it a good decision by coach Pesic? Time will tell. What we can do before the start of the EuroBasket is to look at the potential reasons for Teodosic's cutting from the team.

We don't have to look far back - the Italian Serie A final series between Virtus Bologna and Olimpia Milano could be a good indication of why Pesic made such a bold decision.

A Target For Everybody and Everywhere

In short, Teodosic was the one player Olimpia and their coach Ettore Messina tried to target every possession he spent on the floor.

In Game 1, Virtus' coach Sergio Scariolo decided Teodosic should match up with Luigi Datome. Theoretically, Datome was covering the small forward position and was supposed to spend most of the time in corners, waiting for the spot-up 3-point opportunities in Olimpia's pick-and-roll heavy offense.

Milos Teodosic

Team:Virtus BolognaPosition:PGAge:35Height:195 cmWeight:87 kgBirth place:Valjevo, SerbiaProfileNewsStatistics

The reality was far from theory. It didn't take long before Messina sent Datome to the post and told his players to send the ball there. Teodosic was doing his best - firmly trying to hold ground, often near or above the foul line.

However, the Datome's strength brought the results almost every time they met in post-ups situations.

The Italian efficiently pushed the smaller point guard until the rim, where the field goal percentages skyrocket. Or he gladly bumped the Serbian away for a moment and then faded away for an uncontested jump shot.

This height and strength mismatch in the post remained actual throughout the series, as shown in the video below.

Constant Target on Diamond Set

After Datome's post-ups were the main part of Milano's crucial run in the 4th quarter to clinch Game 1 and the home-court advantage, Messina smelled the blood and came back with even more ways to attack Teodosic.

Diamond's starting point became a vital option in Olimpia's offense, with Datome or Shields making Teodosic follow them around screens on both sides of the court. Shields exposed the slow feet of the 35-year-old, creating himself tons of spaces on off-ball screens.

With Datome, it was more of the same. A couple of times, he even started his post-ups from the 3-point line, successfully finishing closer to the rim.

Messina's Plan

The Professor had only one thing in his mind - how to make the most out of the time Teodosic was on the court. Serbian is hard to contain offensively, but if you can get back the points against him on defense, it's not an awful tradeoff. That's what Messina was aiming for.

He instructed his players to be quick with decisions on broken plays. Whoever was marked by Teodosic often pointed a finger or asked for the ball aggressively and turned bad possessions into points or high-percentage field goal attempts.

You can see Devon Hall pointing to Milos with 5 seconds left on the shot clock on a dead possession and then scoring a stepback two. You can also see Shields calmly asking for the ball with 8 seconds to go and everyone else from the Olimpia team spacing away, giving the American more room to operate.

Milano repeated this in many instances throughout the series. And that was an obvious tactic from Messina because we rarely saw so many Isolations in their offense during the season.

Of course, not all the shots went in, but most of them were high-quality attempts, and that's what mattered the most.

Too Slow Following on Pick-and-Rolls

There wasn't a basketball situation where Teodosic did an above-average job defensively. On occasional pick-and-rolls, when he was matched up with a guard, he fell behind on screens, leaving Mouhammadou Jaiteh or Tornike Shengelia alone against two Olimpia players too often (first two clips below).

The defensive errors sometimes looked awful. In the 3rd clip, note the stance of Milos while preparing to defend a pick-and-roll between Devon Hall and Kyle Hines.

Standing straight, far far away from the ball. And even with a 2-meter gap between them, Hall is able to reject the screen and beat the Serbian with speed to the rim.

Fit with Jokic & Injuries

Jaw-dropping errors like this and the simple inability to defend anyone were a lasting memory of Teodosic's performance in this year's Serie A finals. His offense was dazzling as usual, but it couldn't overcome the glaring holes on the other side of the court.

Thinking about the national team, his fit with Nikola Jokic brings up more questions than answers. What would happen if these two are constantly put in the pick-and-roll defensively? Opposing coaches are smart, and that would be the go-to move for any country in the EuroBasket.

Would Milos be a happy and healthy presence for the locker room with a small role behind Vasilije Micic, Ognjen Jaramaz, and Nemanja Nedovic? In any case, this should have been made clear even before the start of the training camp.

Vasilije Micic and Nemanja Nedovic made it to the final roster after suffering injury scares. Still, if one of their injuries aggravates, Serbian guard depth is somewhat in danger.

That would leave Serbia with only Ognjen Jaramaz and Vanja Marinkovic in the first 2 spots. Marko Guduric had to take over the playmaking duties for a couple of minutes while others were resting.

Nemanja Bjelica was supposed to be an extra creator at the PF spot, but he won't take part in EuroBasket. And even though Jaramaz shined in the extended minutes against Greece, the question is can he do it consistently in the EuroBasket, where the Serbians won't have home-court advantage as they did in the World Cup qualifiers at home.

Possible problems with short guard rotation aside, Teodosic's weakness is more evident than ever. But his offensive prowess hasn't gone away yet. It looked like a rushed but right decision by Svetislav Pesic when he made it.

Will it come back to haunt the coach later, only EuroBasket will tell.

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