The Olympiakos basketball team will try to return to its winning ways when it travels to newly promoted Kavala tomorrow, following its nine-point Euroleague loss at Cibona Zagreb on Thursday.

In order to take part in the first ever top-flight match held in Kavala, Olympiakos left Zagreb to fly to Vienna and then on to Thessaloniki yesterday afternoon, before continuing to Kavala today. “The problem is that we go into the games at a slow pace. We have to change that,” said Lynn Greer, one of Olympiakos’s best players in the club’s 85-76 defeat, its first in any competition this year. “We would lose at some point, you cannot always win,” said Greece forward Yiannis Bourousis. “We were nervous at the start and then we showed some nerves again and lost our lead. Now we have to score one more away win at Malaga or Tel Aviv to meet our target of topping the group,” he added. The other fixtures in this fifth round of the A1 division are Panathinaikos vs Trikala, Olympia Larissas vs Aris, AEK vs Panellinios and Maroussi vs Larissa today, while tomorrow it will be Kolossos Rhodes vs Panionios and PAOK vs Aegaleo.

The draw for the the first round of the European Championsip finals of 2009 will be held today in Warsaw. Greece is one of the four seeded teams so it will be placed at the top of its pool in the competition to be held in Poland on September 7-20. The other top-seeded teams are Russia, Spain and Lithuania.