While Maccabi Tel Aviv and its Head Coach Oded Katash will look to punch their ticket to the Final Four with a win over Panathinaikos on Thursday night (21:45) at their “home away from home” in Belgrade, the Greeks and Head Coach Ergin Ataman will be playing with their backs against the wall in order to send the best-of-5 quarterfinal series back to Athens.

The yellow-and-blue bench boss was clear and to the point in his pregame press conference that it’s a do or die game for Maccabi because should they come up short at Pionir Arena the series will shift back to a raucous OAKA Arena with 20,000 rabid PAO fans waiting to pounce and that’s the last place Katash wants to see this series go.

In fact, no road team has ever won game five a Euroleague quarterfinal series and Katash would very much like to avoid the opportunity to do so.

However, Maccabi isn’t the only team on the court in game four and a Panathinaikos team that is very well aware of the situation will do absolutely everything that they can do in order to eck out a win any which way possible.

Ataman was oozing with confidence in his pregame press briefing and for a coach that has won a pair of Euroleague titles plus ended the 2020 COVID season in first place, no one can doubt his ability to make sure his team is ready to roll.

“Am I confident after the results of these three games? Yes.” Ataman began. “Because in the first two games we played better, we lost the first game on the last ball in OAKA, we won very clear the second game and Tuesday for the first time in the series, I believe Maccabi played much better than us and we didn’t deserve to win. But we had the ball and the possession when everything was going wrong for us, so sometimes you need game luck and ball luck, the mistake that the referees made can happen, but our mistake was that Grant made a ridiculous foul in the last two seconds when he fouled the last shot.

“Tuesday, we didn’t play good basketball, Maccabi deserved to win but I have a lot of confidence in my team because it’s not the only last two weeks, all season the team showed great character. Of course, I’m waiting for more performance from some players that in this series didn’t show yet up to their performance that they showed all season.”

The Turkish maestro has plenty of weapons on his squad and will look for his star guard Kostas Sloukas to bounce back to a performance that is closer to his 29 point showing in game two after a brutal game three in which he scored 0 points and only took a paltry 3 shots. Ataman has also seen a lot of inconsistency from his other players from Konstantinos Mitoglu, Jerian Grant, Marius Gringonis and Kendrick Nunn to name a few and with the quality of the team he does have there is no question that they will be a huge threat in Thursday’s matchup.

“We didn’t start the game well,” Ataman said again of game 3. “We started very soft and lost control, so 35 minutes we played without control, Sloukas needed to control the game. The game was in control of Maccabi, we played out of control, and in those situations also he didn’t have a chance to show his potential.”

Another aspect that has haunted Panathinaikos is their brutal free throw shooting as they have gone 16/26, 14/20 and 12/20 for an overall 63.6% for the series compared to Maccabi who have shot 40/52 for 76.9% overall from the charity stripe. Over the course of the regular season PAO checked in with a 75.3% average from the line which is significantly higher than what they have been able to manage up to now.

“Maybe we didn’t work well for the three throws all season,” Ataman commented. “All season it didn’t effect us too much but now it is, especially in the first game and also in game three we missed a lot of three throws, but we’ll see Thursday what’s going on.”

Jerian Grant, who has close to 300 career NBA games under his belt made the foul that put Lorenzo Brown on the line as game three neared its end looked back to what his coach called a mistake that was one of the reasons cost Panthinaikos the game.

“We just got to be aggressive,” Grant began. “He’s a good player, he’s going to make plays and score points, but we just got to make it tough for him. Everything except for reaching. Obviously I fouled him and that’s not a smart play. We just got to be aggressive. He’s a good player, he’s going to make plays and score points, but we just got to make it tough for him.”

Grant also feels that despite his team being in a 1-2 hole they still have plenty of fight in them to send the series back to OAKA and advance to the Final Four, “We got to play with more energy. I feel like we got to be more physical, bring the fight to them, they were a little bit tougher than us and they won’t have that on Thursday. We got a team that’s going to fight and give our all. It’s a one game season, everybody is focused on that one game and we’re going to go out there and try to get it done.”

One wildcard that will be in the offing for game four is the potential availability of Maccabi’s star guard Wade Baldwin. Will he play or won’t he, that’s the $1 million question. He has been out now since last Tuesday with a hamstring injury but his presence in uniform could be critical in giving the yellow-and-blue the energy for one bog final push to get to Berlin.

Will that effect the way Ataman will manage game four?

“We will play our game, of course Baldwin is a very good player, so for them it’s one positive thing if he would play. Of course, it’s not easy for the morale of the team but this is the playoffs, sometimes you go up 2-1 and sometimes you go down 2-1, so it’s important to win. We want to go to the Final Four and we need to beat Maccabi in the games. Tuesday we lost but we have now two more games that we have a chance to win.”