“It hurts to lose players to injuries,” sighed Seoul Samsung head coach Eun Hee-seok, whose team has lost the most consecutive away games in professional basketball history.
The team lost 75-82 to SK on Tuesday afternoon at Jamsil Student Gymnasium in Seoul, South Korea, in an away game of the 2023-2024 regular season.
With the loss, Samsung became the team with the most consecutive away games in the history of the professional basketball program, which began in 1997.
Daegu Dongyang in 1998-1999, SK in 2003, and Samsung in 2021-2022 had lost 18 consecutive away games, but the team under Eun Hee-seok became the longest losing streak since December last year.
“I keep saying that it’s a problem with the composition of the team, but I feel like I’m making excuses now,” Eun said in the postgame press conference when asked about the loss, “Anyway, we had to hold on as long as we could until the players came back.”
Samsung has been without young strikers Shin Dong-hyuk, Cho Jun-hee and Cha Min-seok, who could have provided the team with a boost.
“We set such a goal to end the losing streak quickly, so today’s performance was especially important,” said Eun. “Fortunately, today’s performance was not worse than the last time. We’ll have to figure it out with the resources we have.”
He also expressed his disappointment with Avan Nava, who hasn’t performed as well as he was expected to before joining the team.
Nava, who joined the team through the AsiaQuarter program, is averaging 4.6 points in 15 minutes this season.
“It’s my fault for not adapting him to our offense sooner,” Eun said, “He’s a player of Aban Nava’s caliber, and we had Shin Dong-hyuk to play the sixth man role, but he’s not there now anyway.”
“Unlike the previous game, the players’ will to end the losing streak was quite strong (today), and it worked well in the first quarter, but I apologize as a coach for not being able to continue it until the end,” he added. 파워볼