Why D’Tigers flopped in Tokyo

Nigeria Basketball team (D’Tigers) coach Mike Brown has revealed why the team failed to bite during the Tokyo Olympics Games.

There had been high hopes for the team before the games, especially after exhibition wins over high profile basketball foes, number one-ranked USA and number four-ranked Argentina.

These results led to the team earning the number four spot on the FIBA pre-tournament rankings ahead of tip-off, further raising hopes of a historic performance.

But all of that came to zero recently, as Brown watched his team go on a second consecutive fourth-quarter collapse to lose 80-71 to Italy, ending any hopes of moving past pool play, let alone claiming a medal.

“For us, it’s the same old song. We have not done a good job of taking care of the basketball,” Brown told ESPN.”We have to do a better job in transition. We were not good in our transition defence, we were also not good at not fouling.

“One of the things we told our guys coming into the tournament is that we have to be smart, we can’t send our opponents to the free throw line and right now they basically doubled our free throws made.

“Just that in itself is a hard number to make up. But if you factor in the way we play with our transition defense and you factor in the way we turn the ball over and how teams have hurt us off our turnover, it makes it really hard.

“They scored 27 points off turnovers and we talked about that. I think out of 12 teams, there might have been one other team that was worse than us at turnovers.

“On top of that, they really hurt us on the offensive glass in the fourth quarter.

“You have to give them credit. We went on a run, we took the lead, but they stayed composed and they just chipped away at it.”