Are we becoming chokers?

[Lietuvis]

I am starting to think since our re-emergence to the basketball scene in the early 90s to become a powerhouse that our teams over the last few years are starting to choke on easy games and are also becoming over-confident on the european and world stage.

Lets start with the game against Australia in the last Olympics. We were well beaten (31pts) in a game that I guess did not matter or would not change the end result as we had topped the group anyway, but to lose by such a large margin was just in my opinion over confident with the knowledge we were playing a team finishing towards the bottom of the group.

This seems to be repeating itself in more recently U20s in Greece where we again lost to a 4th group placed Italy by 1 point after leading well throughtout the game. This repeated itself just last night in the U16s and then we see Turkey beat Russia to drops us to 4th...Last nights mens game, (OK a friendly) but we could have lost that a number of times as well after some commanding leads.

We seem to lose games against the easier teams but pulling out wins on the harder teams. I hope I am wrong but I am seeing that we are not preparing in general for the easier games and our players are going in half hearted into them or at points in the game becoming over-confident and just expecting to win.

This seems to be some basic pshychology that must be afray in our camp as I certainly dont hope we go into the euro championships with such a mindset. I believe if we go in thinking that we are the underdog in every game we will have much better results that starting to be over confident and lose games where we should be winning.

I believe our mind set 4 years ago we had something to prove but now it seems we have lost this drive and passion on the court.

Has anyone else seen this as well?

[BlacKOEIsle]

Don't worry,things will turn better.Anyway,your team are much stronger than China..

[Phantim3dx]

China's bball team is pretty good I think, unless black you were implying to China's football team

[Lietuvis]

U17 World Championships game v Canada. 5 points up 1 minute to go...Choke Choke Choke. Lithuanians are mentally weak...Macedonia quarter final choke choke choke..