The Barça He qualified this Tuesday for the Final four of the Euroleague after clearly overcoming in the fifth game of his playoff the Saint Petersburg Zenith (79-53) and thus place the final 3-2 in the series. Thus breaks a seven-year streak in which the Barça team had been left out of the final battle for the great title of European basketball.
In Cologne (May 28-30) Barça will meet in the semifinals at Armani milan, which also needed the fifth game to get into the Final Four. The Italian team hastily defeated the Bayern Munich by 92-89, confirming the presence in the German city of the first four classified in the regular phase of the Euroleague. The set of Ettore Messina, who was fourth, will challenge the first, Barça, while the other semifinal will be played by the CSKA Moscow (2nd) and the Anadolu efes (3rd).
Who is the favorite in the semifinal that will face Barça and the Armani? There are more than three weeks until the appointment and many things can still happen, such as injuries or covid infections, without going any further. But what can be said is that, if we take the historical results between the two teams as a reference, Barça starts with an advantage.
The azulgranas have won 13 of 21 games of the maximum continental competition that have faced the Armani milan, whether in the Euroleague or its predecessors, the European League and the European Cup. In addition, this dominance has grown in recent years, with Barça winning 9 of the 12 duels that have taken place between the two teams in the last seven seasons and five of the last six since the 2018-19 season.
In the present campaign, Barça has won the two duels against him Armani milan, by 87-71 at the Palau and by 56-72 in Milan. The latter saw a real defensive display of the team from Jasikevicius but in the first the result is misleading, since the Armani He dominated 60-67 with six minutes remaining and ended up conceding a 27-4 Barça partial.