Dubai lose their rhythm in first home defeat

Dwayne Bacon had seven points before Thursday’s game was three minutes old. Dubai were ahead, the opening had brought them some encouragement, and there was still reason to think their home court might provide another good evening after the victories over Real Madrid and Barcelona. By the end, Bacon would have 13 points and Dubai only 58, with much of what had come easily at the start proving difficult to recover.

Crvena Zvezda’s 77 to 58 win on October 8 was Dubai’s first home defeat of the season and their second successive loss in the EuroLeague. It left them with two wins from four games, a record that still includes those two important results against Spanish opposition. What troubled Xavi Pascual afterwards was how little his side had resembled the team that produced them.

“It was a disastrous 40 minutes for us, and perhaps we were only in the game during the first 10 minutes. After that, we lost control of everything,” Pascual said in the club’s postgame release. He described a performance lacking movement and energy, with poor ball sharing in attack and a defensive level below what Dubai had shown in earlier games. There was little shelter in the idea of an unfortunate shooting night. His assessment reached across the whole performance, including the periods when Dubai were trying to recover possession and give themselves another chance to score.

There was ample evidence of the finishing problem. Dubai made 20 of their 61 shots from the field, a return of 32.8 per cent, and just five of 22 attempts from beyond the arc. Those misses left them trying to sustain an attack that could rarely put enough successful possessions together. Even their relatively reliable free throws, with 13 makes from 16 attempts, could do little to compensate for the shortage elsewhere.

The visitors were not having an exceptional night from long range themselves. Crvena Zvezda made eight of 30 threes, but converted 29 field goals overall to Dubai’s 20 and collected 41 rebounds against the hosts’ 36. Dubai therefore had more to address than an opponent finding an extraordinary run of outside shooting. There were opportunities to stay closer, although taking them required a level of consistency they could not find.

The opening quarter had ended with Dubai leading 21 to 16. It was enough to give the home side something to protect, and enough to make the rest of the game more disappointing. Over the remaining three quarters they scored 37 points, giving them little chance of keeping pace once Crvena Zvezda began to establish a lead. A promising first ten minutes had become the best part of their evening, with too little to follow it.

At half time, Crvena Zvezda led 37 to 31. Six points was still a manageable deficit, and the interval offered Dubai a chance to make the game more comfortable for themselves. Instead, the visitors scored the first eight points of the third quarter without reply. The gap was suddenly 14, leaving Dubai to search for both an improvement in their play and a way back into the score.

That passage matters because it came at a moment when a modest recovery could have changed the demands on each team. Dubai began the half within a couple of successful possessions of drawing close; before they scored again, the work required had grown considerably. For a side already struggling to convert chances, each empty trip carried more weight. Pascual’s concern about movement and sharing the ball becomes easier to understand in that setting, when an attack needs to create something dependable rather than wait for a difficult shot to fall.

Bacon remained Dubai’s leading scorer, with Tornike Shengelia adding 12 points. Jordan Nwora finished with 20 for Crvena Zvezda, giving the visitors the highest individual total of the game. Dubai had started through Bacon’s scoring but could not build enough around it to keep the evening on terms they recognised. The result was a home defeat quite different from the narrow finish against Madrid or the attacking returns that had carried them past Barcelona.

Those wins should still have a place in the assessment. Dubai beat Madrid 78 to 77 on September 24 and Barcelona 94 to 87 five days later, before losing 76 to 66 at Fenerbahçe on October 2. Four games have offered both encouragement and obvious work for Pascual, rather than enough evidence for a settled judgement about the season. The more immediate concern is that their EuroLeague scoring has fallen across the two defeats, with Thursday leaving them further from the fluidity of the Barcelona game.

The schedule will give that concern an early examination. Dubai are due to visit Cluj in the ABA League on Sunday, October 11, before EuroLeague games at Baskonia on October 13 and Milan on October 15. Three away fixtures in five days leave limited room between matches, and improving the attack will have to happen alongside the practical demands of preparing for another opponent.

Pascual has at least been clear about the parts of the performance he wants to improve. Better movement and more productive use of the ball would give the shooters a sounder starting point, while greater defensive consistency could make a poor scoring spell less costly. Thursday showed how quickly the two difficulties can compound each other. Dubai left the first quarter ahead and spent the rest of the evening struggling to recover that position. On the road, the task will be to make their good passages last long enough to shape a whole game.