Russia

Coach David Blatt: "It's always special when you beat a team as great as Greece and a EuroBasket champion. That being said the key for this tournament isn't to win early, but winning late. It's to win early but then know how to win the late games. Obviously it's important, but we need to prove ourselves also in Madrid and not only in Granada. Our objective was to raise the tempo the game. We did that in the first game. For the last two and a half quarters Greece set the tempo, but we made a great defensive effort. We made some stops that broke the game and when we opened a 10-point lead in such a game, it's like 25."

Nikita Morgunov: "Today it was a very important game. Now we need to think about the next game because this game is already in the past and we need to think about the future."

Victor Khryapa: "We played against a very good team, but we showed a lot of passion on defense and we managed to control the tempo of the game. That was the key for our win tonight, and what happened tonight made us a real unit. Now we are a real team and we have to thank our coach David Blatt for this."

Greece

Coach Pannagiotis Yannakis: "Congratulations to Russia. They played very good. It was a very nervous game. We missed a lot of shots. We missed a lot of open shots and made some easy mistakes. They controlled the game when we came back. We saw that we can do it, but then didn't have the patience. The tournament is very long and it depends how we will control our feelings and our game after the loss. We tried some things that didn't work out. Maybe we were a little bit tired. The opponent gave us a lot of problems. We shot 58% from the free-throw line and only 38% from the field and that's not enough. We'll try in the next games to play better."

Nikolas Zisis: "It was a very hard game. Both teams played very well on defense. On offense it was a slow tempo game. Russia deserved to win. They played better than us. We need to play much better if we want to try to do the same things that we did in the last few years. It's good to have a day off. We'll start to win the next game. We don't play good basketball until now. We can't hide behind reasons like pressure. Last year in Japan in the first games it was also the same. We must play much better now. When you get 61 points usually you must win games."

Kostas Tsartsaris: "We have time to play better. We scored in last two games very few points and this is the biggest problem of the team. The game in the last year is faster and we play slow. Tomorrow we'll see what we have done wrong, and try to fix it."

Mikhalis Kakiouzis: "We didn't play the game that we wanted. If we scored some free shots I think we had a better chance to play. Nobody has contracts with the wins. I don't think we are not hungry anymore. We want more than anyone in Greece to win again something. For us the EuroBasket 2005 and MundoBasket is history."