Proud head coach hails his side after impressive season
SPEAKING after the second leg, Coach Kapoulas told BristolLive his players had produced “one of our best performances of the season”, and that he was “incredibly proud” of their efforts throughout the whole year. Kapoulas, inset below, said it was “strange feeling” to have won the game in Leicester, but to have lost the tie overall.
“If you’re a fan of the game, you would like to see a third game between Bristol and Leicester this year. I think that would be exciting, like a ‘best of three’ series. Hopefully that will be something that the league would consider moving forward, in terms of making it more of a ‘best of three’, or something like that, where it comes down to the wins rather than just the points difference.
“But we fully knew that was the deal going into it, so it’s not frustrating. Obviously we’re gutted we were not able to overhaul the deficit but we are proud of our efforts, we played a hell of a game, and it just came down to a three-point difference.”
Delpeche, who along with Miller reached the play-off semi-finals with the Flyers last season, said he and his teammates had used some pre-season predictions from basketball analysts that they would finish bottom of the BBL as “motivation” this year.
Former BBL champion turned pundit Drew Lasker and Team GB Olympian from 2012 Kieron Achara forecast the Flyers to finish in dead last out of 10 teams, while former Sheffield Sharks veteran Mike Tuck had them just one place better in ninth.
“Coach said at the end of the game, we have nothing to hang our heads about”, Delpeche said, adding: “Obviously the pain of loss is one thing, but from the jump people had us at the bottom of the league. We weren’t supposed to be in the play-offs. We weren’t’ supposed to be second or third in the league by the end of the regular season. No one believed in us, but we always believed in ourselves. So there really is nothing to be upset about. We played Flyers basketball this whole season, we’ve proved everyone wrong.”