Nigeria’s National Men’s Basketball Coach Mike Brown has fingered the problems that cost his team a qualification spot at the Tokyo Olympics.
D’Tigers lost all three games in Group B at the 2020 Olympics despite heading to the tournament as the fourth best team per FIBA power rankings for the Games.
The West African nation lost to Australia and blew leads to lose to Italy and Germany; Brown who serves as Associate Head Coach of NBA side Golden State Warriors didn’t mince words about caused the third straight loss to Italy.
“For us, it’s the same old song. We have not done a good job of taking care of the basketball. 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” he said to ESPN.
Nigeria now turns attention to the AfroBasket that runs from August 24 to September 5 in Kigali, Rwanda.
By Yaw Adjei-Mintah
@YawMintYM on Twitter
