Japan’s head coach fascinated by Doncic: ‘I haven’t seen one player dominate a tournament like this in over 30 years’ / News - Basketnews.com

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Slovenia reached their second convincing victory in the Tokyo Olympic Games, and after the 116-81 win Japan, European champions got a lot of praise from their opponents.

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Japan’s head coach Julio Lamas stated that such dominance by Luka Doncic is almost unprecedented.

“Luka is one of the four or five best players in the world, and he feels comfortable in FIBA rules,” Lamas said about the Slovenian star. “He creates the game for all the other players, has the size, the vision, to prepare the game for others to have an advantage. I haven't seen one player dominate a tournament over the last 30 years like he's dominating here."

"They played better than us today, especially in the clutch, over the last six minutes when they created a big advantage. They are a deep team with one amazing player, and they were better than us,” added Lamas.

Meanwhile, the brightest star of Japan, Rui Hachimura, who scored 34 against Slovenia, had a little bit different opinion and emphasized that this Slovenian team is not only Luka Doncic.

"That's the point we talked about. It's not only Luka. That team actually has a lot of guys who can score, who can hoop,” Hachimura said after the game. “We were expecting it, but they are a great team. They beat us. It was a tough one."

Slovenia’s head coach Aleksander Sekulic was happy with his team performance and said it wasn’t as easy as it looked.

"Offensively, that's another great game for us,” said Sekulic. “I think we showed our power together as a team; having 27 assists and 54 rebounds say something about this team, and I'm very proud of them.”

“My players played hard for 40 minutes to build the lead we had at the end. Big respect for Japan, especially (Yuta) Watanabe and (Rui) Hachimura, they played an amazing game, it was really hard to stop them,” added the head coach of Slovenia.

Zoran Dragic, who was the second-best player after Doncic today, also praised the Dallas Mavericks star.

"It's crazy because I was playing with his father, and he was like 6-7 years old then,” Dragic recalled. “Now I know he's one of the best players in the world. I'm happy that I can witness it and play with him. He's such an awesome guy, and it's so easy to play with him because he is just an unbelievable person and a basketball player. We're just happy he's Slovenian."

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