Benfica, in front of its Achilles heel: the bench of BAXI Manresa
The Portuguese visit the Nou Congost, where you can see a duel between Jerrick Harding and Aaron Broussard. The players from the Manresa bench were the executioners of Benfica in Lisbon.
This Tuesday will be the second time that a Portuguese team visits the Nou Congost: the first was on November 4, 1997 in the fourth day of the group stage of the Korac Cup, when the then TDK Manresa won by the minimum AD Ovarense (71-70).
In the first leg, BAXI Manresa won 78-97 in Lisbon, winning in each of the four quarters. In this duel, the bench players of the Bages team scored a total of 60 points, a record number in a match of the 2022-23 BCL season. Precisely the contribution of the men who do not start in the starting five is one of the main differences between the two teams in the competition: the Bages team have an average of 40.7 points and Benfica, 18.7.
The team led by Pedro Martínez is proving very solid in its European games as a home team: it has won its last five games by a margin of at least fifteen points (last season against Darüssafaka, Treviso, Tofas and Unicaja, and this one against VEF Riga). In addition, he has scored more than 80 points in each of the last eight games (all of last season and this year against the Latvians).
Benfica will look to Manresa to win their third game in a row as a visitor (they beat Riga 76-89 and Limoges 67-68). Since the 2019-20 season, only one debutant team has achieved this: Turkey's Tofas Bursa in the 2020-21 season.
Tuesday's duel will face two very regular and accurate shooting players: for the Bages team, Jerrick Harding has scored sixteen or more points in the three games of this edition. In fact, he has achieved it in eight of his last nine games in the competition (the other five, with Czech side Nymburk). Finally, the American is 51% successful in field goals this season. From the Portuguese side, Aaron Broussard has scored more than 12 points in the three duels of the group stage, when previously he had only achieved it in two of his previous 11 games (in the ranks of the Russian Nizhny Novgorod and the Polish Anwil). Broussard makes 53.3% of his 3-pointers.