“The problem is your faces!”. On the verge of half-time, with Barça sweating blood to come back from point to point in the final, Jasikevicius asked for a timeout and the faces of his players did not convince him. Without a doubt, they were playing with fear of winning and he reproached him for it. For Jasikevicius, the issue was how to convey to them that winning the final was possible. The next chapter of the mental reinforcement process that the Lithuanian did during the game was at the beginning of the third quarter. Mirotic handcuffed Yabusele, who ended up eating Madrid’s possession. Saras asked Nikola to smile. He wanted to release his players from the pressure and, millimeter by millimeter, it was getting it. But the final explosion was missing.
AND the bomb of the match was Rokas Jokubaitis, that Lithuanian boy who arrived last summer after a moment of doubt in which it seemed, for a moment, that he could go to the NBA. Since the winter of 2020, however, Jasikevicius and Nacho Rodríguez, then general manager of the section, had had meetings with his family. That process of seduction was key so that the player did not jump from Lithuania to the United States. Jokubaitis played the last quarter with the soul of his coach. His 3-pointer, his two fabulous left tackles, were those of a winner. Then Mirotic, great and deserved MVP, made the free throws, raised the title and smiled. What Saras asked of him.