VILNIUS (Lithuania) - If you had a friend who hadn't already caught the bug and fallen in love with the Basketball Champions League and European basketball, you couldn't find a much better club to show them what they have been missing than Rytas Vilnius.
Whether it's the pyrotechnics and rowdy home fans in the Twinsbet Arena, whether it's the team stacked with domestic and hometown talent, mixed in with carefully profiled import stars, or whether it's the hardworking and entertaining brand of basketball put on the floor by head coach Giedrius Zibenas, there is a lot to like about Rytas Vilnius right now.
Identity is a word commonly used by coaches when describing the way they want to play, but the thing you really notice about Rytas is that not only does the team play with a clear identity, the club also has also found a strong identity that marries with it perfectly.
You can see the clearest example of that identity in the performances of hometown heroes Gytis Radzevicius - who is having an MVP-caliber season - and star guard Margiris Normantas, but you can also see it in the hustle and heart that Texan Savion Flagg puts out there on the defensive end night in and night out.
In case you have been living under a rock and missed Rytas' most recent thriller against Pallacanestro Reggiana, Flagg made one of the shots of the season to send the game to OT. Even the cheerleaders celebrated it like fans. That is what it looks like when European basketball is at its best.
In the post game press conference, Pallacanestro Reggiana head coach Dimitris Priftis had this to say about that play:
"We knew what they would do. We were prepared, if you watch and you understand a little bit what they did, it was one baseline screen, and one back screen. We pre-switched, we switched also the two guys on the baseline so we were there. But it's (about) the ability of the player. What can you say..."
As we will show you now, it wasn't the only time that Reggiana knew what Rytas wanted to do, but weren't able to stop them from getting what they wanted anyway. In fact, that is becoming a theme for Rytas' whole season.
Check out the video below, we see two clips of Rytas executing the same Spain pick-and-roll action with Jayvon Graves on the ball and Radzevicius setting the back screen for Steven Enoch rolling to the rim.
In the first clip, we saw the Reggiana defense struggle with the timing of covering Radzevicius screening then popping for the shot and Enoch rolling to the rim. Graves recognized the weakness and threw the lob for Enoch.
The second clip was Rytas' very next offense and this time Reggiana were more aggressive with the trap on the ball screen. Again, Rytas didn't blink and Radzevicius instantly recognized that his man needed to stay in the paint to cover Enoch rolling and popped to three-point line to knock down the shot.
When you watch Rytas play they will do this regularly where they go on short runs of executing different options of the same play several offenses in a row. That may not sound unusual, but it tells you this is a team that's fully in-tune with their system and trust it enough to stick to it when they need it most.
This next video we see the same thing again, as Rytas used three completely different reads out of the same set in the second quarter.
The final clip may be the most telling as Graves recognized that the defense knew exactly what was coming and as soon as they shaped to execute their own defensive coverage, he rejected the ball screen, caught them off guard, and sailed to the rim.
Rytas sit third in the BCL for points scored at 88.8 and score them at a rate of 117 points per 100 possessions. This team is absolutely rolling offensively.
They are only getting better as well. Radzevicius and Normantas have been in and around the club most of their careers and Gytis Masiulis is now in his third season with the club.
RJ Cole is now in his second season, but the likes of Azuolas Tubelis, Enoch, Graves, and Flagg are still just at the beginning of their journeys in Vilnius and the team chemistry is only going to grow from here.
They are now twice Lithuanian champions under coach Zibenas, but the Round of 16 being the furthest they have reached in the BCL is absolutely something that everyone at Rytas is surely driven to change.
The way things are shaping up so far, this season could be the one.