UcanUwill wrote:Lithuania absolutely dominated, but two really weird calls against Larentzakis. F U REFEREE chant kind off worked? But have you seen that Larentzakis double split, my god that mans a quality, if he was a bit more explosive, he could be Franz Wagner no kidding.
For me, Larentzakis has always been a very good player. I used to have arguments with poster Greek here all the time about him. He kept saying he was a nothing player, and I kept telling him, no, he's a really good player, just wait. Even from the youth tournaments, he was a reallu good player.
And he was really very good in FIBA BCL with AEK. So he's been very good for a long time. The hilarious thing is that Bartzokas thinks Isaiah Canaan and Tyler Dorsey are better than Larentzakis, which is absolutely absurd. He's a much better player than either of them, especially Dorsey. But Barztokas always played those guys over him, probably just because they had been NBA rotation players.
Anyway though, comparing him to Wagner, if he was bit more explosive......no. Larentzakis is a very good player, but you have to understand he's playing on a Greek team without all scorers. Like how you were saying with RHJ. He's a very good player, but I've watched him for years with Olympiacos in EuroLeague, and while Bartzokas is a moron for using Canaan and Dorsey over him, still, Larentzakis is no star for EuroLeague or anything.
He's a really good championship caliber role player as they say. But his scoring ability is exaggerated in a tournament like this, because he's the only good scorer Greece has on the team, and also I think because the other teams don't really know who he is. It looked like Lithuania was already focusing on him more.
Larentzakis is very inconsistent in his performances, especially with his scoring. So he will have 2-3 big games, then he will do almost nothing for a long time. If you just looked at the stats, to make a similar comparison for Greek NT, you might think he's like possibly Nikos Zisis level in scoring, with worse play making and passing, but he's not. Because Zisis was super consistent, and teams paid attention to him.
Larentzakis is better though than how he gets treated by Bartzokas in Olympiacos. Not a EuroLeague star, but way hell of a lot better than freaking Tyler Dorsey and Canaan, that were played over him. And he's also better than Nick Calathes, that kept bricking all those years with Greece, and yet somehow still kept getting selected by the genius coaches. Probably also because he was an NBA rotation player. It just shows the level of brain power that some of these supposed genius coaches actually have.
