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It's hard to say that any championship game is as unimportant as this one, but the one on Wednesday against Brose and Ludwigsburg was certainly less important than today's which will be played in the semi-finals of the German cup in Berlin. Brose on Wednesday won with +9, they weren't that great, but coach Andrea Trinchieri calculated, and that was obvious. He decided to rest Zisis, Melli and Radosevic, lowered play-time for some standard players, so the best scorer was young Nikolic who probably won't even play today. Trinchieri didn't want to reveal everything before today's match.
Brose's motivation won't come in question; under Italian's lead they never won the cup, in the last four seasons the trophy has been slipping away. The match against Ludwigsburg can be compared to the one against Bayreuth. In the championship Brose barely beat this season great Bayreuth, only in overtime, but in the quarter-finals when they were fully focused, they beat them in an away game with +23, by the end of the first half it was +25. Tomorrow the cup finals are up, I expect Brose to start out strong today. On Wednesday they were leading against Ludwigsburg with +9 by half-time (41-32), in Ludwigsburg +11 (33-22).
Ludwigsburg's record in Bundesliga is 9-11; with some comparable teams it was like this: they lost at home to Bayern with -10 (at half-time -10), they lost -3 to Bayreuth (-14 at half-time), -29 to Bayern (-23), -17 at Bayreuth (-2), -17 against Ulm (-14). The only plus is the win against Ulm in the cup quarter-finals, but at the time they were the hosts, and Ulm were quite bad. I'd call it an exception. Ludwigsburg don't do well against strongest German teams, and motivated and complete Brose are one level above. The pre-season game against Brose doesn't have much significance, but considering they played it on neutral grounds in Bayreuth, and today they're playing on neutral grounds again, we should add that Bamberg team won with 82-63, at half-time it was 45-29.