Basketball Bundesliga: Bamberg Baskets lose surprisingly

That was a surprising setback! After two home wins in a row, Bamberg Baskets could have equalised their points tally and crawled closer to the playoff places. However, they lost 85:92 at bottom-of-the-table BG Göttingen instead of winning.

The players of Head Coach Oren Amiel fell back into old, bad habits on their visit to Lower Saxony. Bamberg appeared to underestimate Göttingen, who had not won in seven games, and the Baskets were too far away from the home side in defence when shooting from beyond the arc. Göttingen's threes rang in Bamberg's basket eleven times, six from distance and so 18 points more than Bamberg. It did not help the Amiel players that they had the edge in rebounding - when the Amiel players were on the verge of making the game clearer, as was the case with 39:32, Göttingen scattered the threes in. Moreover, Bamberg's top scorer to date, Zach Copeland, was unlucky with his threes - he alone missed five of his 16 shots on the stat sheet.

Although Bamberg was able to turn a 70:76 deficit into a 79:78 lead in the final period with six points in a row from top scorer Tray Woodbury and a three by Patrick Heckmann, Malick Johnson's lay-up to make it 83:81 with two minutes remaining was the visitors' last lead. Apart from Woodbury, Adrian Nelson and EJ Onu as well as Filip Stanic and Malick Johnson scored in double figures, but unfortunately not in crunch time, when all Bamberg's players showed nerves and gave Göttingen the win.

Oren Amiel (Bamberg Baskets' Head Coach) commented: "Göttingen deserved to win in the end. There's not much more to say. We're a young team. We'll keep fighting and make adjustments. That's all."

Next Saturday, 9 December 2023, Bamberg Baskets face the quarter-final of the BBL Cup on the road at RASTA Vechta at 2 pm. A win would qualify the Amiel boys for the cup top four.

Further information can be found at www.brosebamberg.de and www.easycredit-bbl.de.