Immediately after the "painful" elimination Friday in the semifinals against Olympiacos (76-62), Monegasque coach Sasa Obradovic projected himself on the small final, Sunday against Barça still in Kaunas (Lithuania).

"We'll see how to regenerate after that, mentally and physically. The season is not over. We have to go hard (Sunday)," said the Serb, whose team reached the first Final Four in the club's history, in his second C1 campaign.

After the Elite play-offs (quarters from Wednesday against Strasbourg), it will be time to think about the next C1 campaign.

To win the supreme title (only won by Limoges in 1993 for the France), "you have to have 6-7-8 players who have been playing for years together, because they know each other perfectly," Olympiacos coach Georgios Bartzokas said on Saturday.

This is not yet the case for the ASM, most of whose current workforce has been composed since the summer of 2022.

Almost all the key pieces of this 2023 vintage are committed until 2024 (Mike James, Elie Okobo, Jordan Loyd, John Brown), or even 2025 (Obradovic, Donta Hall, Alpha Diallo).

Only the contracts of captain Yakuba Ouattara and Lithuanian pivot Donatas Motiejunas expire at the end of the season.

Beyond these two cases, the team of the Principality, with athletic interiors, could seek to strengthen with a profile of winger-strong shooter, which he lacked Friday and which should have been Adrien Moerman, left in January only six months after his arrival.

The huge empty passage experienced in the third quarter (2-27) also highlighted a lack of experience and leadership, no player having been able to put order in the game and the Monegasque heads when, opposite, Kostas Sloukas and Thomas Walkup masterfully orchestrated the rise of the Greeks.

The question of the room

Behind the scenes, executive director Oleksiy Yefimov and chairman and majority shareholder Aleksej Fedoricsev will have to work to convince the leaders and the 13 permanent members of the Euroleague (including Asvel) to give ASM a place in the 2024-2025 season.

The Roca Team, invited to participate in this semi-closed league in 2021 after its Eurocup title, earned the right to stay there this season and next by reaching the play-offs each time.

While Fedoricsev, through its Fedcom group, is a partner of the Euroleague and its broadcaster in France, the club of the Rock aims for a permanent license, however conditioned to the construction of a hall with a capacity greater than that of Gaston-Médecin, enlarged last summer in record time to reach 4,700 seats.

The question of this future arena is a sea serpent in Monaco, which the Euroleague wishes to integrate in the coming years.

"We want Monaco. They are in a part of the France, the Côte d'Azur, where basketball has a tradition, in the Principality as in Antibes, and where we want to be established," declared in January to L'Equipe the American Marshall Glickmann, boss of the Euroleague, who is also thinking about an expansion and a reformatting of the competition (from 18 to 20 or even 24 teams including Dubai, establishment of conferences as in the NBA).

© 2023 AFP