Lauri Markkanen’s hitting accuracy from behind the arc has been far from normal in the basketball World Cup.
OKINAWA. Susijengi fell short of the medal favorite Germany on Monday at the World Championships, when Germany won with a score of 101-75.
Finland’s number one star Lauri Markkanen bagged 12 points. He hit only 3 of his 11 free throws. Half of Markkanen’s points came from the free throw line.
Markkanen missed all six of his three-point attempts against Germany. The hitting accuracy of the entire tournament is 3/20, or 15 percent.
The readings are far from the usual Markkase. In the last NBA season in Utah, the “King of the North” sank threes with 39.2 percent accuracy.
In the last European Championship, the accuracy of three-pointers was 40.5 percent.
Finland’s head coach Lassi Tuovi can’t see any single clear reason for Markkanen’s lower than normal hitting accuracy.
– This is a matter of self-confidence. Lauri’s hitting accuracy and other small things are starting to improve when we play better as a team, Tuovi told Urheilu.
When Germany went away, Markkanen stayed on the bench. The Suomalaistahtahti clocked 22 minutes of playing time in the match.
Tuovi reminded about this when explaining the stakes of the end of the week in the lower continuation series. Finland will play for the Olympic qualification spot on Thursday and Saturday.
– We need him in the two final games. He’s got a hell of a load. He gets beaten up all the time. In this game, rotations were tested with other players. This game had lower stakes than Thursday’s match. It has a big contribution, Tuovi stated.
In its next group, Finland will face two countries from the second group played in Okinawa. Two countries from among Georgia, Cape Verde and Venezuela will face each other.
The wolf gang bullied Germany almost until half time. In the second period, Finland had a dark moment of three minutes, when Germany cut the difference to eight points at halftime. Then, at the beginning of the third period, Finland couldn’t stop Germany’s attack at all, and its own attack didn’t get going either.
Finland tried to keep up with Germany with positional defense.
– The positional defense caused us problems in the first half. We talked at halftime that we need to stick to our own story, who played with Lauri Markkanen in Chicago Daniel Theis said about the decision of the match.
Theis also guarded Markkas in the match.
– It was fun. Lauri is one of the best players in the NBA. He is not easy to defend. Lauri plays in the four position, but brings the ball up and plays ball screens. He does everything. It was quite a challenge to defend Lauri, Theis stated.