FC Bayern basketball players in the BBL: Trinchieri criticizes heavily

Andrea Trinchieri, who was born in Milan, often oscillates between Etna and Vesuvius on the sidelines. Sometimes the 54-year-old coach of the FC Bayern basketball team runs bubbling up and down, sometimes he yells at his players with his arms spread wide and turns on his heel with so much momentum that his tie starts flying. On Sunday in Ludwigsburg, however, Trinchieri was also at his wits end.

“Gotta play for the team,” he snapped at the players during the final time-out, but they just stared blankly into space. A little later, Munich’s highest official defeat of the season was 68:96 against the MHP Riesen, a team that is in sixth place in the basketball Bundesliga, but usually does not have the collar size to pose a threat to the Munich team – let alone them so much to humiliate.

The worst thing for Trinchieri was that it wasn’t one of those defeats, as they happen after a four-game week, in a 90-game season, in which at some point in the thicket of Bundesliga, Cup and Euroleague, the legs and the head becomes heavy. Rather, after the black Sunday, Trinchieri became more fundamental than perhaps never before in his two and a half years in Munich: “Gianluca Vialli died a week ago, a great footballer,” the Italian continued: “He always said one thing: whoever wins, enjoys – Whoever loses explains. But I can’t explain anything today, and I have no excuses. For me, it’s the worst game I’ve coached in my six and a half years in Germany. We were embarrassing, that’s the low point.”

This completely dispassionate performance raises the question of how the Munich team want to become German champions again for the first time since 2019 after their last season without a title. The double is the declared goal, as Managing Director Marko Pesic recently confirmed in an SZ interview. In the Euroleague, the club would have to catch up after a weak start in order to still reach the playoffs of the top eight. The Munich team has been struggling through the competitions since the start of the season, with impressive victories such as against Maccabi Tel Aviv being followed by bad bankruptcies.

The Bayern basketball players keep showing weaknesses this season

In Ludwigsburg, the US-American Cassius Winston was the center of criticism, who scores like an assembly line on good days (he scored 21 points against Ludwigsburg), but who is more a soloist than a team player. In addition to the poor throwing rates, it was striking that the players were far too far away from their opponents in defense, defended sloppily and didn’t seem to be awake at all.

If pillars like captain Vladimir Lucic or Othello Hunter are missing where a harder style of play is required, like against Ludwigsburg, then the system is quickly falling apart. “We’re talking about being tired and okay it’s our third straight week of back-to-back-to-back-to-back games – but sorry, I don’t give a shit. We’re here to put on a jersey Honor, play hard. We didn’t do that,” said Trinchieri, almost pleadingly. And: “Of course this is a turning point.”

The Italian came to Munich in the summer of 2020, so far he has won the BBL Cup with Bayern and was the first German team to make it to the Euroleague quarter-finals. With his demanding nature, he also led the team through the corona pandemic with all its cliffs, and he was also in poor health at the time. “We’ll dive after every ball and leave everything on the court,” he said when he signed up in 2020. In Ludwigsburg nobody jumped for the ball.

You are currently experiencing a coach who is struggling with himself after every game, with the team, maybe even with his legacy. His contract expires after this season, a single title within three years would not be enough, for Bayern with their claim anyway, but also for Trinichieri. During his time in Bamberg he won three German Championships between 2014 and 2018.

Is the squad too unbalanced? Are the professionals overwhelmed by the merciless schedule? Has the coach lost his motivation somewhere on the sidelines in the last few years?

In Ludwigsburg, Trinchieri drew a bitter balance: “Not one player has found a way to play. And it’s all about energy and intensity.” It’s his job to restore it.

He sees the team and himself as a submarine crew on a mission and doesn’t look left, right, up or down, said Trinchieri, who loves language images, recently. Now he’s in demand as a crisis manager, repairing the sonar as the boat continues to sink and the crew suffers from an acute lack of oxygen. Until Friday there is time before the next appearance – then Euroleague winner Anadolu Efes Istanbul is waiting.